William Dalrymple delivered a lecture on how art and culture evolved during the Mughal era in India which spanned over three centuries. He dispelled the myth that art stopped flourishing after emperors like Akbar and Shahjahan. Trisha Mukherjee reports
Without a collection of paintings from the Mughal era, it would have been difficult to trace many historical facts and interesting accounts. Mughals were great patrons of art. Their exquisite paintings share stories untold, tales of victories and celebrations, and those of rout, unfolding new facts in history, evoking awe, wonder and anguish.
“A renaissance anywhere requires immense economic prosperity, but the Delhi renaissance took place when the city was bankrupt. It was a democratic literary renaissance,” said author William Dalrymple as he delivered a lecture on ‘Princes and Painters in Mughal Delhi (1707-1857)’ at the National Museum.
India was ruled by the Mughals for more than three centuries, and Delhi, hitherto Shahjahanabad remained the centre of art and culture. The word ‘Mogul’ which has found a place in English dictionaries is a synonym for nobility and power.
A myth regarding the Mughal reign has often been that art and culture was at its peak when Akbar and Shahjahan were at the throne, and saw a steep decline during Aurangzeb’s rule, who detested any form of patronage but his own.
“Aurangzeb certainly wasn’t a lover of art, but that the Mughal art and culture died in Aurangzeb’s time is not true,” said the author.
Although Akbar’s was certainly the Golden age, but a couple of similar eras followed, even after the fall of Aurangzeb. The early 1700s saw the flourishing of music, the sitar and tabla in particular, under Muhammad Shah, who went on to chair the Mughal empire for the next forty years.
“The art in Muhammad Shah’s time was resolutely about pleasure,” informed Darlymple, vindicating the emperor being popularly called Muhammad Shah ‘Rangeela’, and went on to show explicitly colourful paintings from Shah’s rule. A fine exhibit from the time was a painting of the emperor playing the Hindu festival Holi in the courtyard of Red Fort with dancing girls. The painting which was a ‘sea of colours’, Darlymple said, “must have made Aurangzeb turn in his grave.”
Nadir Shah, realising the unarmed status of the Mughal empire, carefully finds a way in through the Indian subcontinent in 1739. After having occupied, Kandahar, Kabul and Peshawar, he finally “breaks the Mughal military mystique” by capturing Delhi. Not only was there a steep decline in art, which like Aurangzeb, Nadir Shah too detested, it was a time of “rape, loot and anarchy” in Delhi.
The fall was disastrous, when Muhammad Shah’s ‘mismatched’ army of 1.5 million warriors was defeated by the mere 1,50,000 fighters of Nadir Shah, who not only captured Muhammad Shah but also took away as many as “5,000 carts of jewels”, including the famous Kohinoor diamond and Peacock Throne from Shahjahan’s time. Before the British colonised India, a period existed when they were merely visitors to the country, and the very first ones underwent profound transformations. David Octalone and William Frazier, for instance, succumbed to the Mughal idea of pleasure and would have dancing girls at their service while they would smoke and drink.
This period saw the rejuvenation of art, under the rule of Bahadur Shah Zafar, when the portraits were more lifelike and psychologically accurate. Afghani characters dominated these pictures, for the Afghans were the source of business for India. A very popular painting representative of this period was that of the villagers sitting together to pay taxes to the wazir, who is busy making calculations. This painting is supported by the panchnama which details the occupation of every villager present, breaching the gap between the artist’s mind and that of the viewer.
Bahadur Shah Zafar, the last Mughal catalysed and provoked Delhi for, in Darlymple’s words, “a really remarkable last renaissance.” “The emperor himself was an excellent calligrapher and poet,” said Darlymple, as he showed some specimens of Zafar’s work.
Meanwhile the British were unsuccessful in their trade in textiles, and began growing opium, largely in Uttar Pradesh to make up for their losses. The consequences of this trade in opium inspired paintings depicting opium addicts lying unconscious on roads and in front of opium shops.
There was an overt rise in Anglo-Mughal identities, before the British took over control completely. Bahadur Shah Zafar had risen to the stature of Pope in Mughal Delhi, which is excellently represented in Ghulam Ali Khan’s most accomplished work The Coronation Portrait. It shows the emperor sitting on an English chair in front of Shahjahan’s ‘Scales of Justice’. The year of 1856 saw a rift between the British and the Mughals, which culminated into the Sepoy mutiny of 1857, which Darlymple says, “was more of an uprising,” and added, “majority of these Hindu sepoys who rose in mutiny against the British chose to join Zafar’s army.”
The Jallianwalah Bagh massacre, which is considered to be the most ruthless in the history of India’s fight for independence, “only witnessed a few hundred deaths.” The British, in 1857, came in through the Kashmiri gate, and slaughtered, “if not a million, a hundred thousand people,” within the premises of a hitherto glorious empire.
It is sad and pitiful how before the last Mughal breathed his last while he was in exile in Rangoon, he was denied the mere joy of writing poetry, “and his body was tipped into an anonymous grave, and the turf carefully replaced so that within a month or two, no mark will remain to indicate the place of his burial.”