Dear friends and fellow travelers,

With the forthcoming event in Ayodhya on January 22, the atmosphere here in Delhi, already famous for being polluted in a material sense, has thickened to a spiritually poisonous and unbreathable concentrate of Hindu chauvinism, malice and bullying. I am deeply anguished by all this as an Indian and as a Hindu. And after thinking hard about what I can do, I have decided to go on a fast starting Saturday the 20^th and ending on Tuesday the 23^rd a day after the January 22^nd production at Ayodhya.

I am doing this first and foremost as an expression of my love and sorrow to my Muslim fellow citizens of India. I cannot let this moment pass without saying as loud as I can to my Muslim brothers and sisters that I love you and that I condemn and repudiate what is being done in the name of Hinduism and nationalism in Ayodhya.

I am also doing this as an expression of my love for my Mughal heritage. This is not only about feeling protective towards someone else. It is about my culture and my ethos. I love dhrupad and khayal music. I love kathak. I love the Mughal and Sultanate buildings in my city of Delhi – I cannot imagine Delhi without the Qutub Minar or Humayun’s Tomb, or the Sabz Burj. Not to mention the Taj Mahal next door in Agra.

I revere the magnificent culture spawned by the court of Awadh under Nawab Wajid Ali Shah. I see the Delhi Sultanate as also having given something precious to India, as it was with them that the Sufis and Amir Khusroe’s father came here. In North India we owe so much of our language and culture to Hazrat Amir Khusroe. He adopted Hindavi into a language of poetry which later spawned the grand languages of Hindi and Urdu. He made innovations in music that laid the foundation of Shastriya Sangeet – the classical music of North India  – of which we are all so proud. The list is endless.

There is no part of our high classical culture in North India which does not bear the stamp of the Sultanate, the Mughals, the nawabs and the nizams. This is not to say that any of these traditions were the sole product of these rulers, or that it was Muslims that enlightened us. On the contrary, this culture is the result of the mingling of the native arts, traditions and languages with those that were brought by the Sultans and the Mughals. A mingling which only happened because of the embrace by them of the existing culture.

Can we speak of Amir Khusroe’s music without speaking of Gopal Naik, the famous Hindu court musician from whom Khusroe learnt so much? Can we speak of Hindustani Classical music or Kathak without speaking of the Dhruvapadas or the Rasas of the Natya Shastra? Can we speak of Tansen without speaking of Pandit Haridas? Can we have Kathak without the traditions of the raasleela, and the performance of the Ramayana and the Mahabharat in India from times immemorial? Can we have Dhrupad without the worship of Lord Shiva? Can we have Dhamar without Holi? Read the writings of Abul Fazl, the court biographer of Akbar. See how he sings praises of Hindu beliefs, practices, sciences and philosophies. Do you know that Akbar commissioned a Persian translation of the Mahabharata to showcase what a great culture the Hindus had? And he was such an admirer of the Mahabharata, that when the translation was read to him he scoffed and said that it was not good enough. Look up the work that Nawab Wajid Ali Shah did with kathak compositions, dance dramas and kavits (poems) – they were all inspired by the traditional celebration of Radha-Krishna by his Hindu subjects.

This is not meant to be a lecture in history so I will stop here, but the examples go on and on. And I have given them to explain that when I say that I love my Mughal heritage, I am saying that I love the composite culture that grew out of the Hindu and Muslim traditions of this land. A culture in which you cannot pick out what is Muslim and what is Hindu anymore; or what was native and what was foreign. It has been a millennium of intermingling, and of reciprocal inspiration and admiration. Influences are from everywhere. This is not an imposition of foreign things, it is how a culture develops in conversation with other languages, aesthetic traditions, faiths and philosophies. The dramatic form that is described in the Natya Shastra emerged from a culture that branched out of the encounter of the subcontinent with the Greeks. If you keep throwing things out by calling them foreign or non-Hindu, then what will we be left with? The culture that grew under the Mughal empire was not imposed, it was not developed anywhere else, it grew here, from this soil and is unique to this land.

And let me tell you that I do not consider my only heritage to be Mughal. I come from a mixed background of Tamil Brahmin and Punjabi Sikh – and I love and cherish all those parts of my heritage too. My husband has mixed Rajasthani Jat and Jath Sikh heritage with a family history in the military and I have been delighted to adopt his legacy, with all his tales of valour and chivalry as my own.

In the work that I do helping Indian families abroad whose children have been snatched by cruel foreign child services agencies, I inevitably end up learning about the culture and religion they come from, and I found that they would seep into me. From my Bengali families I was introduced to Maa Durga whom I now celebrate with as much joy as my Bengali friends. From a recent case involving a Jain family, I have been intrigued enough to start studying some Jain scriptures. And this life history is not unique to me. It is repeated in countless Indians of all ethnic and religious backgrounds all over the country for centuries.

Hindutvavadis insist that you need one religion and one culture and one language to develop a coherent identity. It is simply not true. You can equally develop a cosmopolitan and porous identity. It is not a question of what you exclude or include, but of values and conviction. And this is not some new, modern idea. India has always been a land of diversity and these question of identity, community, authenticity and social division have always been there. And we have always been faced with a choice to be open or to be closed. This is a conversation going back millennia. Emperor Ashoka in the 3^rd century BC said पियदसी राजा सर्वता इचति सवे पासंडा वसेयु, सवे ते सयामाम च भाव- सुधिम् चइचति । Meaning: It is always my wishfor persons of all faiths live on my lands. For they all essentially believe in good thinking and good conduct. पूजेतया तू एव पर-पासंडा तेन-तेन प्रकारणेना। Find numerous ways of honouring those of other beliefs. एवम् हि देवानंपियस इच्छा किंति सव – पासंडा बहु – स्रुता च असू कलाणागमा च असू । Be broad of knowledge and seek to understand others’ beliefs.Cultivate an attitude of friendliness and openness to all.

Two millenia later in the 16^th century, Emperor Akbar is saying the same thing:

“He is a man who makes Justice his guide on the path of inquiry, and takes from every belief what is consonant with reason. Perhaps in this way the lock, whose key has been lost, may be opened.”

“Notwithstanding that at all periods of time, Hindustan has never been lacking in prudent men with excellent resolutions and well-intentioned designs, there are misunderstandings and quarrels between its different religions.

“Through the apathy of princes each sect is bigoted to its own creed and dissensions have waxed high. Each one, regarding his own persuasion as alone true, has set himself to the persecution of other worshippers of God.

“Were the eyes of the mind possessed of true vision, each individual would withdraw from this indiscriminating turmoil and attend rather to his own solicitudes, than interfere in the concerns of others so that dissensions within and without can be turned to peace and the thornbrake of strife bloom into a garden of concord.

Five hundred years later Gandhiji said “The essence of true religious teaching is that one should serve and befriend all. I learnt this in my mother’s lap. You may refuse to call me a Hindu. I know no defence except to quote a line from Iqbal’s famous song: मज़हब नहींसीखता आपस में बैर रखना, meaning, religion does not teach us to bear ill-will towards one another.”

I have found no difficulty in embracing diverse ideas and practices while all the time thinking of myself as a Hindu. In my personal practice, for wedding or functions in my family I have rituals conducted in the manner of my paternal grandmother – as the homam is done among Tamils because, personally, I prefer the way Sanskrit is pronounced by the Tamil purohits and the way the puja is done. But that is because that is how I grew up seeing pujas. This does not stop me from feeling shraddha, astha and comfort in any place of worship – whether Nizamuddin Dargah or the Vatican or Jama Masjid or the Ganeshji Mandir built by my grandfather here in Delhi on Baba Kharag Singh Marg or my personal favourite temple – the magnificent Brihadeshwara temple built by Rajarajachola in Tanjore which is a few minutes’ drive from my ancestral village in Tamil Nadu.

I am not an orthodox Hindu, I do not know all the mantras or observe the fasts or dietary taboos or pray every morning or regularly go to any temple. But I don’t see the votaries of Hindutvavad as being very orthodox either. All our saffron twitter influencers, actors and news personalities live very modern lives – and are not living the traditional orthodox Hindu way, whether in marriage, food habits, clothes or lifestyle. Even the January 22 function is not following the Hindu orthodox way – the Shankaracharyas are complaining that it is not being done according to the strict traditions.

For me this is not an issue. Hinduism is not a hidebound faith. For every shastric way of conducting some prayer there is also an upay around it. This is the openness of Hinduism and its constant reminder to remain focussed on the spirit of things and not the material side, even in conducting prayers.

For me Hinduism is all the stories of our gods and goddesses which somehow define my very existence. It is like they are always present with their epic stories and great wars and loves and philosophical dialogues like an unseen but very real drama that is always going on around me and filling my inner world with colour, counsel and comfort. Everything comes alive with them, and becomes an offering to them. When I bow to my harmonium or the stage (as my Muslim Ustads have taught me to) Devi Saraswati comes before my eyes. When I was exhausted and frustrated as a young mother with my naughty toddlers, it was the tales of Yashodha driven to distraction by the mischievous Krishna that gave me comfort and understanding. Feminists will start groaning when I say this, but when I gave up work to become a full-time mother, and everyone looked at me as though I was an alien, I found a wellspring of strength and self-assurance in the feminine Hindu ideal of seva  – of devotion, sacrifice and service – in which you forget yourself and give everything – tan, man, dhan – to serving those, whom it is your duty to serve. So I am sincere when I say that I think of myself as a Hindu. This is what Hinduism is to me. And if I am not a Hindu or if this is not Hinduism then you have to say that to my face.

Again and again we are reminded by the Hindutvavadis that the Mughals invaded us. Yes, the first Mughal came here as a conqueror. But he did not take Delhi from any Hindu ruler. Whom did Babar fight in Panipat?  It was Ibrahim Lodhi. Before that he defeated Daulat Khan in Punjab. Let us be clear, the Mughals entered India with the conquest of a Muslim by a Muslim. In fact, it was the conquest by a Muslim of several Muslims. Before defeating Lodhi, Babar had conquered the Afghans in Kabul. Some historians say that there might have even been proposals of an alliance between Babur and Rana Sanga, the Rajput king, to fight Ibrahim Lodi. That alliance did not happen, but when Ibrahim Lodi was defeated, his brother joined forces with Rana Sanga in order to try and defeat Babur. So Babar’s was not by any means a simple story of a Muslim conquest of India.

I am not going to say that Babur’s victory here was not without its pathos. Conquest is terrible in its violence and destruction. No doubt each conquest is the end of something, the death of something. I can imagine that there would have been an adjustment that Hindus would have had to make, especially in the initial years, being ruled by non-Hindus. But Mughal rule in India was never particularly focussed on Islam. Though that would have already taken place under the earlier Muslim rulers who had started coming here since the 9^th century. That was the time of kings and conquests. It was the age of imperialism. And it was precisely to end imperialism, blood feuds and war that people turned to ideas of democracy, pluralism and secularism. Ideas that we in India are recklessly rejecting in the name of invasions from 1000 and 500 years ago. Is it not possible to say: can’t we just move on from all this?

The Mughals were also not enemies of the Rajputs for all the 500 hundred years that they ruled here. They entered into marriage alliance with Rajputs. Some of their senior-most generals and officials were Rajputs. Their clothes, architecture and culture took so much from the Rajputs. Get into your car and drive out of Delhi; within minutes you are in Rajput territory, with their forts, palaces and temples all around. Were they erased? Were they taken over by the Mughals? No. They were right there, a stone’s throw from the Mughal capital.

This is why the Ram Janmabhoomi agitation was such a lie when it claimed to be fighting 500 hundred years of Hindu ghulami. Mughal rule was nothing like that. It was about the ambitions of kings and conquerors; and neither Hinduism nor Islam played any other than an ancillary role in all this. Except for Aurangzeb none of the Mughals were very observant. They drank wine, consumed opium, preferred the Sufis over the Ullema, Akbar was even accused of being un-Islamic, his Din-e-Ilahi was seen as a direct challenge to the Muslim orthodoxy, his very name, Akbar, was seen as an irreverent appropriation of Allahu Akbar.

Whatever you say about the pain of Mughal invasion, it did not give birth to centuries of Hindu repression or enslavement. It gave birth to a beautiful culture that took nothing away from Hindu religion or culture.

And now we come to the vexed question of conversions and breaking of temples by invaders. From today’s point of view, both are wrong. But let us be clear, first and foremost, about the limits of the claimed historical wrong. We are not talking about hundreds of years of repression of Hinduism, or a state policy of conversion to Islam or of mass building-over of temples with mosques. While such things did occur both before, during and after the Mughals, it was not the policy of the Mughals to convert Hindus or break temples in India. In fact, they built temples, patronised native arts and many of them, like Akbar, made huge efforts in stopping religious prejudice, persecution and maintaining communal harmony here.

So, at most we are talking of a handful of mosques, built hundreds of years ago on the one hand in a context and society that does not exist today, and causing hurt, mistrust, instability and division in the fabric of our society, along the length and breadth of our country, on the other. Look at what has happened in Manipur where old antagonisms have been provoked.

There is no justification for stoking such deep and lasting social turmoil for the sake of destroying a few mosques. It never ends. You heard what the Karnartaka BJP MP said about wanting to demolish mosques in Karnataka. Why can’t we simply say that we have better things to do than to endlessly fight over mosques and build temples?

The worst thing about these temple agitations is the ugly feelings they provoke; feelings that take us as far away as it is possible to go from religion. I was about fifteen years old when the Ram Janma Bhoomi agitation started, with LK Advani’s Rath Yatra. My entire school was for it. There is no ugly statement about Muslims that is made today, that I did not hear from my fellow students in school. I will never forget the malice in their eyes; the spite dripping from their lips. I will never forget the glee with which they would wave the tapes of Sadhvi Ritambra’s speeches, which they would play in their cars on the way to school. But I never ever, before, then or after, heard them talk about Lord Ram, or any other god.

It was the same with BJP supporters when I went to college. That was when the Babri Masjid fell. The saffronites were never short of snarky comments about Muslims but I never saw them express or demonstrate any devotion to any god, or any eagerness to go to any temple. And there was nothing particularly dharmic or Indic about these people and their families either. They lived a life which was no different to any secular, liberal family save in their abuse of Muslims.

It was never about devotion to Lord Ram. It was all always only and only about Hindu chauvinism and insulting Muslims.

How can anyone celebrate a temple built on the back of such lies, violence, spite and vengefulness? How can this be squared with the teachings of Hinduism? If there was cause for revenge in building this temple then how is such a motivation of revenge and anger justified in Hinduism?

Take the Bhagavad Gita? Do those rejoicing at the building of the Ram Mandir consider the Bhagavad Gita to be a Hindu text? Well, what does the Gita say about morality in action? It says that your acts can be moral only if you perform them selflessly, in the spirit of duty, as an offering to god, not to fulfil your own desires and wishes. According to the Bhagvad Gita no act of revenge or anger or with an eye to the fruits of action is a moral act. Karmenyev aadhikarastey, maa phaleshu kadachana.

This is what the Gita says about acting in anger: क्रोधाद्भवति सम्मोहः, सम्मोहात्स्मृतिविभ्रम:| स्मृतिभ्रंशाद्बुद्धिनाशो, बुद्धिनाशात्प्रणश्यति ||    Anger plunges you into Delusion, Delusion erases Knowledge. With loss of Knowledge, is Reason lost, With Reason lost, you Fall.

The Gita starts with Arjun saying to Krishna that he does not want to fight. And Krishna’s first response is तस्माद् युध्यस्व भारत. Get up you are a warrior, you must fight or you will be reviled by the world.  This is the 18th shloka in  the 2nd chapter of the Gita. So if that is the message of the Gita then why does it continue to 18 chapters? What more was there left to say that the Gita carried on for 16 chapters more?

Does Krishna repeat his sayings about the duty of the warrior not to run from the battlefield? No. The dialogue goes on because there is so much more to the question of what is moral action; what is a Dharma Yudh. Even when we breathe we kill so many tiny beings, so how can we humans ever speak of moral action?

All the chapters that follow the initial exchange between Arjun and Krishna are a deep reflection on this question. And the answer that emerges is that you can never truly renounce action; you can never be free of karma. Simply in living and by existing you perform karma. But equally, you must always be ethical in your actions. How can you do this? How can you keep your moral purity while engaging in any action, whether eating and breathing; or killing your brothers and uncles in war? And the answer is what we call ‘nishkaama karma’. Acting without desire, without greed, without anger, without any selish interest. Does the slogan ‘Mandir vahi banega’ strike you as anything but angry and vengeful?

What does Hinduism say about how to fight wrong? अक्रोधेन जयेत् क्रोधम्, असाधुं साधुना जयेत् ।जयेत् कदर्यम् दानेन, जयेत् सत्येन चानृतम् ॥ This is from the Mahabharata. It means Defeat anger with calm, bad conduct with good; Win over meanness with generosity, and falsehood with truth. And we all know “Ahimsa Parmo Dharma” which Gandhiji was so fond of quoting.

The Manu Smriti – there is a tendency these days to mock the Manu Smriti because of its description of the caste system. But all Hindu scriptures and epics have caste. If that is a reason then everything has to go – the Gita, the Valmiki Ramayana – everything. What I say is follow the Manu Smriti, but follow all of it. See what it says about the 10 principles of Dharama: धृति: क्षमा दमोऽस्तेयं शौचमिन्द्रियनिग्रह: । धीर्विद्या सत्यमक्रोधो दशकं धर्मलक्षणम् ।।Patience, forgiveness, self-restraint, not to take that which another’s, purity, abstention, righteous action, pursuit of knowledge, truth, renouncing anger.

So for all these reasons I call what is happening in Ayodhya on January 22^nd a lie, a celebration of wickedness, a desecration of Hinduism, and an affront to our civilisational heritage. I am fasting as an act of protest and sorrow. I will take liquids and some sugar and salt to keep my health in balance.

I have some family matters that need to attend outside my home, I hope I will be able to do so. Otherwise, I will be at home, and I will log on from time to time. I will do readings from Tagore, Gandhi, Martin Luther King and other great people who have come from this land and been inspired by the people of this land, in the hope that it will give us all some margdarshan in these dark and hopeless times.

Jai Hind.

The post A Fast & Penitence: 72 hours of Love & Sorrow to fellow Muslims, pride in My Moghul heritage appeared first on SabrangIndia.

It’s a breezy, spring morning in Delhi, the sparkling sunlight streaming through a speckless, blue sky is rather Pahari. Professor Ebba Koch, sitting across the table, under a bougainvillaea blossom, wraps her head to keep the sun at bay- “never thought I would be in purdah”, she laughs. The Mughals, her dramatis personae, did construct tents to provide shade from the scorching tropical sun. This, too, was expressed as a political metaphor- the tent separated the light of the sun from the radiance of the emperor, the carrier of divine light, or Farr-i izadi, invoking notions of illumined kingship from early Indic, Persian and Timurid traditions. Notwithstanding the sun, what followed was a conversation on the political iconography of the Mughals, the nature of early modernity, and Professor Koch’s work in South Asia and Europe, spanning over four decades. A fascination for fluid histories took over a previously structured framework for an interview, and what we have is a stream-of-consciousness conversation, held together by the very nature of early modernity, a connectedness that defies delimiting frames. We parted while discussing Professor Koch’s photographic archive, painstakingly put together over the years, her harvest from the field. I wonder what personal memories and histories each photograph, each negative might whisper if heard attentively, transgressing temporal and geographical boundaries, as in her work, reading the contemporary in the early modern, making the imperial intimate. As Professor Koch asked reflectively, in her essay, “The Mughal emperor as Solomon, Majnun, and Orpheus, or the Album as a Think Tank for Allegory”(2010), I ask with wonder- “how much more multilayered could an image be?”

Somok Roy: Professor Koch, let’s begin with a discussion on early modernity. With the recent shifts in historiography, early modernity has received scholarly attention. As an art historian working with visual sources, how do you reconstruct the early modern, in terms of the methods that you use?

Ebba Koch: Firstly, in India, the Mughals are not put under the category of early modern, they are thought to be medieval, and I have a problem with that. But we could talk about my methodology, to begin with. I studied European art history in Vienna. The Viennese school of art history and architecture focuses on the analysis of forms, identification of the style of a particular artist, and they question where a particular form comes from. The major thrust is on formal and stylistic issues. I was asked to do a paper on equestrian monuments in the Austrian Baroque and thought the formal analysis was somewhat limited. I turned to Germany, where in the 60s and 70s, Critical Theory and Habermas’s work had introduced a different approach to art, and the economic conditions in which art was produced, and its political context were being studied. I found this very appropriate, and these are the two methodologies that I have been working with when I came to India. However, I was asking myself whether it was justified or legitimate to approach Indian art with methods that have developed in the European context. Eventually, I used a syncretistic approach, on one hand, the analysis of style, on the other, to look at the context and ask about the meaning- why was a particular work of art created, what was it meant to express, and here I was particularly interested in the political context because the ‘use’ of art was a major concern of the patrons. I read Mughal sources, with the help of Dr Yunus Jaffery of Zakir Hussain College. Not much was coming from Mughal sources in terms of theorising art, compared to the literary genre of theories on art and architecture that were produced in early India¹, hence I had to go forward with my own method.

SR: Your magnum opus, Shah Jahan and Orpheus: The Pietre Dure Decoration and the Programme of the Throne in the Hall of Public Audiences at the Red Fort of Delhi was published in 1988, much before “connected histories” became a fashionable thing to do. Sanjay Subrahmanyam begins his explorations in connected history in the 1990s.

EK: Yes, but this has to do with the fact that I came as a European art historian to study the Mughals. My formal training in Vienna had nothing to do with Islam or the cultures of the Ottomans and Safavids. Both Islam and India were new for me, which I really had to work on. Initially, I was interested in and fascinated by the European elements in Mughal art, and tried to answer the question of why would the Mughals use European forms. This is how I came to connected histories. At that time I used the word “influences”, which in today’s time is wrong. So my first paper has its origin in my friendship with a Jesuit scholar who invited me to read a paper on the four hundredth anniversary of the arrival of the first Jesuit Mission to the court of Akbar- “The Influence of the Jesuit Missions on Symbolic Representations of the Mughal Emperors”, which was the first in a series. As a European art historian, I first saw the European quotations and motifs in Mughal art, in a similar way, the Mughals looked at the cultures and traditions of the European courts for newfound expressions for things that were already familiar to them. This again relates to the question of micro and macro history, but I would like to describe myself as a micro-historian. I’m interested in a detailed study, but I also like to look at linkages, I like comparisons of two factors which one knows reasonably well. Often macro or global historians end up talking about things superficially, perhaps because one relies a lot on secondary literature. For instance, millenarianism has become a catchword. I don’t think the Mughals were so impacted by thinking about the end of time.

SR: This brings us to Azfar Moin’s The Millennial Sovereign: Sacred Kingship and Sainthood in Islam (2012) on millenarian sovereignty, in which he vividly draws upon art historical materials, especially in The Painted Miracles of the Saint Emperor (2014).

EK: He engages with the German scholar Kantorowicz’s work on the king’s two bodies. Moin operates with the notion of sacred kingship. The way the Mughals described it was perhaps a kingship sanctioned by God, as it was represented in different media. What I find really valuable in Azfar Moin’s work is his engagement with the irrational side of the Mughals. He looks at magic and other such practices, which too was part of early modernity, and gives a complex picture.

SR: Going back to micro-history, I’m reminded of Carlo Ginzburg, who was in Delhi a couple of weeks before. In a conversation, he said that he tries to write about the methodology so that the reading public has a sense of the inferences, of the practice of “doing” history. In your recent essay, “Palaces, Gardens and Property Rights under Shah Jahan: Architecture as a Window into Mughal Legal Custom and Practice” (2019) which employs architecture as a source to study the history of legality and inheritance, you begin on an anecdotal note, discussing your survey, documentation and analysis of Shah Jahan’s palaces and formal gardens. It perhaps helps the reader to contextualise the work of the historian.

EK: What I try to do is to make the reader trace my process of recognition, to take them along in this journey. Talking about methodology, like what I did with my paper on equestrian monuments, I structure my approach based on the material I’m investigating. You cannot come with a preconceived set of ideas. Methodology evolves from the material in the archives. For instance, we don’t have texts that directly tell us about ownership rights in Mughal India. A picture began to form in my mind when I was reading the histories of Shah Jahan with Dr Jaffrey, who was a big help, and I would make a note when a palace of a mansabdar was mentioned. When I put this material together, I realised that the palaces, havelis and gardens would not remain with the mansabdar on an inheritable basis. Constantly things were changing in terms of land ownership, and this comes out when you put isolated material together, in a context. Again, I have restricted myself to a specific social category, that of the highest ranking officers or the Khassan. I think the historical material should be the basis of method, to avoid stereotypical thinking and generalisations. In the 1990s, at a conference of the College Art Association, in the United States of America, I remember almost every panel was trying to fit into the frame of either postcolonialism or deconstruction. I, however, did stylistic analysis put into the specific context of the artwork.

You were asking about visual material as a source of early modern history. The Mughals expressed certain things only in art, and visual sources make a different statement, as I have shown for the Padshahnama. The empire’s whole relation to Europe was expressed visually. Thomas Roe spent more than two years in the court of Jahangir, and not for once does Jahangir mention him in his memoirs. But the interest in European art is expressed in other media- painting, architecture, applied arts, and obviously now in India, it’s not politically correct to follow Mughal interests! Interactions with other cultures in the Roman Empire have led to famous discussions amongst scholars, for instance, the French anthropologist Paul Veyne’s work on Palmyra, which was a Greco-Roman province in Syria. He says that the people in Palmyra adopted certain foreign practices and usages, in order to update themselves, but not to lose sight of their historical identity. Similarly, the Mughals looked for newer forms of expression. Their interest in naturalism drew from the arts of the European courts. Abu’l Fazl writes that art was also used to express abstract ideas and in this case the idea of rulership.

SR: We could think of visual expressions of the divine light in the form of a halo or nimbus in the works produced in Jahangir’s atelier.

EK: Yes, the halo was used in Buddhist art, from ancient times, but the Mughal depiction was different. The Mughals looked at the materials that the Jesuits brought with great interest but did not convert to Christianity, but used it for their own representation as sacred kings, as rulers sanctioned by the divine. Another thing that we might reflect upon is that after the construction of a self-image, how far does a ruler believe in it, in terms of practice. Take, for instance, Jahangir’s chain of justice. It is a royal gesture going back to the Achaemenid times. It could have been a public performance, a spectacle, a mere allegory!

That Jahangir was using Achaemenid symbols in the seventeenth century, reminds me of the French scholar Bruno Latour, who said that we have never been modern². This could also answer your question on early modernity! Something that Azfar Moin also points out, the other side of the Mughals, as we have discussed before. Again, in the early modern, allegory is constructed with reference to science, for instance, Jahangir’s globes. Scientific instruments, globes and cartographies are depicted in paintings of the emperor. This could seem like a contradiction, given we have magic practices on the other hand, but that was the complex nature of early modernity.

I was also thinking of Jahangir’s image as an Indian king. Akbar had undoubtedly started this, but it was Jahangir who expressed many of his ideas in the visual arts. It is remarkable to think of how he expressed through allegories the idea of justice, carved out elephants in keeping with the notions of Indian kingship, and to depict himself clad in a yellow dhoti like a Rajput ruler. The Mughals would take from any source that served their purpose, that was their form of universalism.

SR: So we could call it transcultural.

EK: Yes, very much so. In his letter to Shah Abbas, Akbar wrote that he accepts all religions and cultures that give him the right to rule above all. Tolerance was also seen as an instrument to rule.

SR: Coming to your extensive work in the field, how did it all begin?

EK: When I came to India and looked for plans of Mughal buildings, it was very hard to find them. The British had done surveys and the Archaeological survey of India continued to map sites and monuments after Independence, but hardly a few on Mughal monuments were published. I started going around with a measuring tape, with the architect Richard A. Barraud, much like a nineteenth-century colonial surveyor! We would measure buildings, prepare ground plans, make drawings, and at that time there was no internet. The architect would make blueprints and send them to me, which I would correct and send him back. It was a very challenging task. Many of the palaces of Shah Jahan were being looked at for the first time. We also did a survey of the Agra Fort. The survey and documentation material of Shah Jahan’s palaces and gardens is weighing heavily on my shoulders.

SR: Can we expect Shah Jahan’s palaces and gardens as the next publication then?

EK: Inshallah! One had to cross over a hundred years of art history for this. On one hand to do the basic documentation in the field, and then to ask the finer questions that the discipline has developed.

SR: There has been a concerted attempt on part of the current ruling party in India and its allies to vilify the Mughals, and very viciously and simplistically equate the Mughals with Muslims at large and tell them that this is not their homeland. The question of the homeland, however, was important in a fluid early modern world characterised by frontiers and contact zones. What is often invoked for wrong purposes, based on intentional misreadings is Babur’s distaste for things Indian as recorded in the Baburnama. How would you look at the question of the homeland as it appeared in the Mughal imagination, and the recurring references to Timur as a source of legitimacy in the Mughal world?

EK: One thing that Babur complaints about is the Hindustan of the Lodhis, and not of earlier Hindu rulers, something that is often made out of his writings. Obviously for Babur India wasn’t a place of preference. He wanted to build an empire in the footsteps of his ancestral provinces in Central Asia. The situation was fraught with the contesting claims of the Uzbeks. But he came to Kabul and then India, quite literally in the footsteps of Timur, carrying the Zafarnamah of Sharaf ad-Din Yazdi. Akbar focused less on Timur as a source of legitimacy, but later it was Shah Jahan who commissioned a genealogical dynastic portrait to document his lineage from Timur and undertook the Balkh and Badakhshan campaigns, to come as close as possible to him. References were also being made to Timur’s legacy in Samarkand, particularly in architecture, by adopting elements like the use of minarets in the Taj Mahal and other Shah Jahani structures. The Ottomans also did it, but there was a renewed interest in the Mughal world. Jahangir too sent finances for the upkeep of Timur’s tomb, Gur-i Amir, in Samarkand.

SR: Shah Jahan even goes on to use the Timurid epithet Sahib Qiran³

EK: Yes, but even the Safavids and Ottomans used it. But Shah Jahan used it in a very ostentatious way. His usage was very formalised, structured, and demonstrative.

SR: Thinking of formalism and demonstration, I’m reminded of your work on Mughal gardens, and especially the integration and use of natural formations like grottoes and terraces to further political ideas. Could you talk about such parallels of political landscaping in other cultures?

EK: In China, scholars left inscriptions in interesting natural settings, but it was not so much of an imperial practice. In early India, Ashoka, of course, commissioned inscriptions on rock faces. The Achaemenids and Sassanians also used rocks and other natural formations to inscribe kingship allegories. In early modern Europe, gardening was prevalent, not just out of love for nature but to demonstrate both economic status and rulership, for instance, the gardens of the Medicis of Florence. The idea was to leave an imprint in the natural world. The inscriptions that the Mughals commissioned were often genealogical in nature.

SR: Another interesting theme that you have written about is the erotic in imperial art. I’m reminded of your reading of the Mughal hunt as a romantic dialogue between the predatory and the prey, who behold each other. Could you touch upon the writing of the history of emotions with reference to this image?

EK: Let’s look at the image of Shah Jahan as portrayed in contemporary sources. The European travellers in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century read love into the story of Taj Mahal, influenced by the idea of romantic love in eighteenth-century Europe. Qazvini too wrote about Shah Jahan’s grief on Mumtaz’s death, and tells us that the court was clad in white, the colour of mourning, and that there could be no public celebrations on Wednesdays, the day of her death. Grief, and indeed emotions, become the subjects of history. There’s a shift in the writing of Shah Jahan’s history- suddenly tarikh stops and masnawi begins, and once the story of Mumtaz’s death is narrated, it goes back to the genre of tarikh. It is through a reading of these accounts that one feels that Shah Jahan could also be described in the light of the story of Layla and Majnun.

SR: In that sense, the style of writing official histories was being experimented with.

EK: Yes, but also the content- what constituted history. Architecture too becomes a subject of history. What Jahangir does for natural history, in terms of minutiae observations, for instance, his description of the breeding habits of the saras cranes, Shah Jahan does for his architecture. Scientific descriptions of architecture and consistent usage of terms is a remarkable feature of Shah Jahan’s chronicles. On consistent use of terms, Stephan Popp’s recent work on the practices of gift-giving shows how pishkash, pay-andaz, etc. were used in a more formalised manner in Shah Jahan’s histories.

SR: Coming back to the Mughal hunt, how did it occur to you that the Persianate allegory of the moth being attracted to the flame could be read in the relationship between the prey and the predator?

EK: I studied the hunting palaces of the Mughals, of which Shah Jahan built some. I read Persian poetry with Dr Yunus Jafferey during this time. The Mughals, as hunters, were aware that in India hunting was slightly problematic because it went against the principle of ahimsa. The Rajputs did hunt, but the Mughal hunt was quite different. In “primitive societies” hunting rituals were performed in which the relationship between the hunter and the hunted was expressed. The Mughals chose to depict the prey as the one craving to be hunted, and since this was expressed in poetic terms in which the predator became the lover and prey the beloved, the moth and the candle imagery was used.

SR: Do we have records that tell us about the traditions of apprenticeship in the imperial atelier?

EK: There were family lineages, for example, Abu’l Hasan was the son of Aqa Riza, and Manohar the son of Basawan. Painters did learn from their fathers and elder brothers. Manuscripts were produced and illustrated in the ateliers. Akbar looked into the work of his painters, so did Jahangir in an even more engaged manner, and Shah Jahan. Qazvini writes about it, but Shah Jahan’s official historian Lahori doesn’t. There’s a history of close interactions between the ruler and his painters. Jahangir claimed to recognise the work of each painter in his memoirs and prided himself as a connoisseur. Coming to the institution of the kitabkhaneh, it was run by a closely-knit group of people involved in the art of the book.

SR: In terms of Shah Jahan’s architectural projects, can we think of the histories of labour and work?

EK: I would believe that there’s been some work on this in Aligarh. But nobody really thought of the people who were involved in making the buildings, they were always associated with the patron. Shah Jahan wasn’t very keen on recording the names of his architects. Calligraphers, however, were allowed to sign their creations, for instance, the calligrapher of Taj Mahal, Amanat Khan. Calligraphy has a very high status in the arts of the Islamic world. Interestingly, the labourers were allowed to put mason marks on buildings.

SR: What are mason marks?

EK: Mason marks are figures, symbols and inscriptions on buildings, that were probably done for collecting payments. Similar marks at different places perhaps indicate the work of the same person.

SR: In the introduction to your new book, The Mughal Empire from Jahangir to Shah Jahan (2019) you mention that the work hopes to engage students with the nature of early modernity. That makes me think of you as a teacher, and what teaching means to you.

EK: I mean students in the widest way, and we are all students. I really enjoy teaching, but at Vienna, people like to know about the Mughals, but very few work on them. But I have been engaging with students outside Vienna, like Yuthika Sharma, Chanchal Dadlani, Mehreen Chida-Razvi, and Afshan Bokhari. Afshan Bokhari’s research question looked at Jahanara’s self-representation as an imperial patron and her engagement with the sufis.

SR: In your recent essay, “Palaces, Gardens and Property Rights under Shah Jahan: Architecture as a Window into Mughal Legal Custom and Practice” you begin with a discussion of the existing literature on legal rights of inheritance in early modern South Asia which reviews the work of historians who function within methodological-scholastic frames, like Irfan Habib, Athar Ali, Ranajit Guha and John F. Richards, all stalwarts of their respective schools (here, “Aligarh”, Subaltern and “Cambridge”). You, on the other hand, don’t belong to any such school of history writing. How do you think of your methodology?

EK: I still see myself as an art historian trained in formal analysis, which works fairly well for the Padshahnama paintings and the audience halls of Shah Jahan. But I’m an art historian with a strong historical bent. I try to look at the historical context and its details, and perhaps bridge the gap between history and art history. Sanjay Subrahmanyam and Azfar Moin did engage with art historical writings in their scholarship. Sunil Kumar and I engage with each other’s work, and perhaps the next generation of historians would look more closely at visual material.

SR: With the populism of the global right, Islamophobia is on the rise…

EK: All images of the Islamic world that the media circulates are extremely aggressive. A couple of years ago when I was attending a literary festival in Lahore, the motto was ‘books not bombs’, but no media house reported it globally. You are absolutely right, the Muslims are under siege, one could say.

SR: So at this juncture, doing the history of Islamicate cultures could imply a political intervention, much needed to bust the myths propagated by the media. What does “doing” Mughal history feel like?

EK: Doing Mughal history is a tight-rope walk. Neither the Islamist orthodoxy in Pakistan nor the saffron in India back the Mughals. On the contrary, Ottoman history in Turkey receives considerable institutional support. But for me, it’s an extremely rewarding exercise, and I wish to impart this to my students. I see the Mughals as models of political acceptance. Rajeev Kinra, in his work, “Handling Diversity with Absolute Civility: The Global Historical Legacy of Mughal Ṣulḥ-i Kull”(2013) points out that in 1641, Thomas Roe, in his speech to the English Parliament, held up the Mughal example of rulership that could improve the economic conditions of the realm, which is quite contrary to the idea of oriental despotism. His was a different voice on the Mughals, a different opinion altogether. 

Courtesy: Indian Cultural Forum
 

The post Beyond Modernist Frames: Ebba Koch on the Mughal World appeared first on SabrangIndia.

Somok Roy in conversation with Mika Natif

Mika Natif at the School of Arts and Aesthetics, JNU

Traditional scholarship has viewed South Asian art under the shadow of a European “influence”. In sharp contrast, art historian Mika Latif’s imaginative work on Mughal courts, Akbari paintings and eroticism in the arts of the Islamic world, offers new ways to read artistic dialogues across cultures. Her recent monograph, Mughal Occidentalism (2018), published by Brill, is a detailed study of Mughal paintings, which challenges the conventional classification of material culture on regional, communal, dynastic, or temporal identities.
In an interview with Somok Roy, Mika Natif reflects on the world of Mughals, teaching humanities, and ‘recasting’ women in the histories of early modernity.

Mughal Occidentalism (2018), published by Brill, focuses on Mughal-Renaissance cultural exchanges

Somok Roy: In Mughal Occidentalism (Brill, 2018), you locate the relationship between Mughal art and European art, in trans culturalism, which is different from the traditional idea of a dominant European “influence”. Why do you think that this shift is necessary, and how did you read visual material differently to avert this notion?
Mika Natif: I believe that the shift in perspective was necessary in order to emphasize the agency of Mughal artists and patrons regarding the artistic relationship between European and Mughal painting. It seems that nobody was truly asking the question of why in the 1580s-1590s the Mughal elites – patrons and artists – would be even interested in incorporating Renaissance and Christian materials into their own creations, and what would these images mean for them.

Until very recently, the art historical discourse was shaped by a Eurocentric, not to say chauvinistic, agenda. Scholars have regarded the phenomenon as an “influence” of European and Catholic art on Mughal painting. The term “influence” alludes to imbalanced power relationships in which the “influencer” appears active and powerful and the party being “influenced” is passive and therefore weaker. My intervention challenges such a paradigm that casts these Mughal paintings as essentially derivative of Renaissance art and I move away from binary views of artistic exchanges. In the book, I demonstrate how these innovative visual changes were grounded in the new Mughal policy of sulh-i kull (‘universal conciliation’ or ‘peace with all’) and the formation of a multivalent empire with global aspirations.

SR: Your emphasis on parsing, selection, adaption and repurposing restores agency to the Mughal patron and artist. This positions Mughal visual culture as an intellectual tradition in its own right, and the ateliers as a site of knowledge production. Are there textual sources that refer to these practices, and do we see a similar reworking of the “oriental arts” in the courts of early modern Europe?
MN: Mughal textual sources can be allusive sometimes, and I often find myself reading between the lines. On the other hand, we should examine them critically and not accept immediately everything they say at face value. Ideally, as an art historian, I try to create a balance between textual and visual sources and pay attention to the ways they support or contradict one another. For example, Abu’l Fazl, the court chronicle, describes the ways in which paintings were inspected and evaluated every week by the Emperor and the head of the royal library. From his description we may learn of the close attention to details under which works of art were scrutinized. Did Akbar really examine paintings every week? Most likely not. After all, there were times that he was on the move, dealing with military campaigns or suppressing rebellions in the empire. However, Abu’l Fazl’s description of this close examination correlates to what I see within the works of art themselves: great attention to details that can only be achieved through intricate processes of parsing and selecting.
As for similar processes on the European side, the works of Rembrandt are a good example. Gary Schwartz gave a fascinating paper on his “Mughal series” a few months ago.

SR: In your book, you define “Mughal Occidentalism”, with reference to “international cosmopolitanism and a politics of cultural superiority on the part of the Mughals.” While scholars like Ebba Koch have written on Mughal cosmopolitanism in material culture, the politics of cultural superiority of aesthetics in a global/transcultural context seems like a new area of enquiry. Could you elaborate on the specificities of the cultural competition?

Jahangir with a globe- a favourite self-image of Mughal sovereignty and transculturality of the emperor. This painting is housed in the Chester Beatty library, Dublin. 

MN: Mughal claims of cultural superiority can be seen in textual sources, as has been demonstrated by the works of historians Muzaffar Alam, Sanjay Subrahmanyam, and Corrine Lefèvre. These attitudes are also visible in several incidents linked to paintings. For example, when Sir Thomas Roe, the English ambassador under King James I, visited Jahangir’s court, he brought a painting as a gift. When he was asked and then failed to identify some of the figures in the picture, the Ambassador was reprimanded by the Mughal Emperor.  On another occasion, Jahangir put Roe’s cultural abilities into test. He showed the Englishman five images, one original and four copies, of a European painting that Roe himself brought as a gift to Jahangir, and asked him to identify the original. Roe, of course, failed to do so, to the delight of the Mughal Emperor.

Other modes of artistic competition can be seen in the works of Abu’l Hasan, Ruqaya Banu, Nini and others.

SR: Both “Orientalism” and “Occidentalism”, like anyother ‘ism’, have been in the eye of the storm in the academy for years. How have your colleagues and fellow art historians responded to “Mughal Occidentalism”?
MN: So far [I] have been getting wonderful responses from colleagues in various fields. I think that the book bridges a gap in scholarship on pre-modern South Asia and initiates a new dialogue between Renaissance specialists and historians of Islamic art.

SR: Coming to your fascinating work on micro-landscapes in Mughal paintings, especially from the Akbari atelier, would you tell us how you began working on background narratives and receding landscapes?
MN: When you spend so much time looking at illustrated manuscripts and paintings from the Akbar period, one cannot resists delving into the amazingly intricate and idyllic landscape features that appear in so many pictures from the 1580s-1590s.  And then it makes you think about what is represented in these panoramas? Who are these figures? And geographically and temporally speaking, where all of this is located?

Sādi in a rose garden with his friend, painted by Govardhan, from a Gulistān manuscript. Natif reads homoeroticism in the metaphors and visual translations of Persian poetry. The folio is currently in the Freer Gallery of Art, Smithsonian. 

SR: In your study of landscape narratives, you draw beautiful connections between man and nature on one hand, and the notions of civility, justice and akhlaqi literature on the other. How does the idyllic, agrarian village, and the urbane Mughal metropolis come together in Akbari paintings?
MN: In the landscape painting, Mughal artists were masterful in portraying harmonious and balanced settings of the built world and the cultivated natural realm, related to Mughal urbanism and garden tradition. From a reading of Mughal literary sources about cities, topographical descriptions, and poetry in praise of urban centers, a geographical identity is revealed, which is manifested in the creation of micro-architecture landscapes in paintings. The particular time in which these vignettes appear, the 1590s, has a direct link to the crystallization of Akbar’s policy of the sulh-i kull and his striving to achieve balance and harmony among all subjects in the empire. These idyllic and intricate urban landscapes in the background of paintings reflect the Mughals’ sense of pride and ownership toward Hindustan and the reaffirmation of their just rule.

SR: You have also made significant contributions to the literature on sexuality and eroticism in art. At a time when global movements to acknowledge and decriminalise queerness and multifaceted sexualities is taking place, how does writing on premodern sexualities aid or enrich contemporary movements? Do you believe that academics have a greater responsibility leaning towards activism, especially if their research resonates with contemporary concerns?
MN: I hope that learning about pre-modern eroticism and sexuality and their role in art, poetry, literature and beyond, would help to contextualize and normalize such ideas. I also would like to believe that studying the Humanities may bring openness and tolerance towards others. This is where I see the role of academia in becoming a responsible and active agent with regard to contemporary concerns.

SR: As a specialist of ‘Islamic art’, who focuses on the transcultural worlds of ‘Muslim societies’, what does teaching art history mean to you in an age of seemingly ceaseless strife and disharmony? Do you see art history, and more importantly the act of teaching, as powerful engagements to battle the divisive hatred poured by the state and media?
MN: I am a great believer in education and learning. I think, as human beings, we are constantly in a state of learning. This is not something that stops once you graduate from school or university. Learning is a central part of living in the world, being open to great ideas, innovations, technology, and even smaller niches like cuisine and cinema. Teaching students to adopt this perspective and become critical thinkers is crucial, and I strive to do that through art history.

SR: In India, the ruling government is propagating a virulent form of nationalism, that is exclusive and predatory to say the least. A project of rewriting of the nation’s history based on notions of purity and indigeneity, and a complete erasure of hybridity or diversity is being orchestrated. Why, do you think, ‘transculturality’ poses an alarming threat to totalitarian politics, and how can academics and scholars make a public intervention at this point, outside the university departments and academic circles?
MN: Thinking about the Mughals and their policy of sulh-i kull, I believe that accepting ideas of transculturality means being self-secure, self-assured and comfortable, without feeling threatened by the existence of others or “otherness”.  Hence, transculturality comes from a position of great strength. It is also the place in which curiosity and inquisitiveness, which are notable signs of intelligence, come into play.

SR: Your current book project focuses on the portraits of Mughal women, c.1590-1660. We have recently seen a proliferation of works on Mughal women and gender politics, for instance the writings of Lisa Balabanlilar and Ruby Lal. How did you decide to work on women’s portraiture, and what should we look out for in your upcoming book?
MN: It’s actually very simple. In the last chapter of Mughal Occidentalism I focused on portraits of the Mughals. My initial thought was to include a section on female portraits and their relationship to European art. However, as work progressed, I realized that this was a bigger and more complicated issue that requires its own publication. There is a lot of “house cleaning” to do, and the topic is very exciting and timely.  I am having a lot of fun with the material!

Mika Natif teaches art history at the George Washington University, in Washington, D.C.

Somok Roy studies History at Ramjas College, University of Delhi. His research interests include early modern court cultures, the histories of desire and sexuality, and performance in Mughal India.

Courtesy: Indian cultural Forum
 

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A look at illustrated historical manuscripts and Deccani paintings from the British Library.

Being invited to give a series of three lectures on this wide-ranging topic at a seminar at the Universita di Ca’ Foscari in Venice in July 2016, I thought this was a good opportunity to write a blog highlighting the interesting material in the British Library. Here are discussed such images in Mughal and Deccani painting.

Yogis and other types of ascetics are found in Mughal illustrated historical manuscripts showing encounters recorded in Mughal histories between the emperors Babur, Akbar and Jahangir; and also in individual album paintings. From the Mughal point of view, more or less all Hindu ascetics were classed as yogis, since they all practiced bodily asceticisms of some kind or another.

The Mughal concern with naturalism towards the end of Akbar's reign to some degree accounts for what appears to be the accuracy of the early Mughal images of ascetics and yogis. Early Mughal pictorial representations of yogis have, as Jim Mallinson points out (Mallinson, Yogis in Mughal India) enormous value as historical documents on account of the accuracy and consistency of their detail, overwriting in many instances what can be gleaned from the conflicting literary traditions.

It is obvious, he writes, that a variety of traditions shared ascetic archetypes and freely exchanged doctrines and practices.

Ascetics being shaved at Gurkhattri in 1505. Detail from painting by Gobind from a copy of ʻAbd al-Rahim Khan’s Persian translation of the Baburnamah, 1590-92 (British Library Or.3714, f.197r)

In the account in his autobiography, the Baburnamah, of his first raid into Hindustan in 1505, Babur, the founder of the Mughal dynasty, mentions the well-known cave of Gurkhattri near Bigram (Peshawar) with its then-famous great banyan tree: "It was a holy place for yogis and Hindus, who came from faraway places to cut their hair and beards there."

Babur, however, did not visit it at that time.

In 1519, in the course of another incursion, he managed to visit it.

… reaching Bigram, went to see Gurh Kattri. We entered a small, dark chamber like a monk’s cell and after passing through the door and down two or three steps, we had to lie down to get in. It was impossible to see without a candle. All around was an unending pile of hair and beard that had been clipped there. Many chambers like the ones in madrasas and caravansaries surround Gurh Kattri. The first year I came to Kabul … I went to the great banyan tree in Bigram and was sorry not to have seen Gurh Kattri, but it turned out not to be much to be sorry for.
 

Ascetics at Gurkhattri in 1519. Detail from painting by Kesu Khurd from the 'Baburnamah', 1590-92 (British Library Or.3714, f.320v)

The sacred site at Gurkhattri was clearly in the hands of the Nath yogis, followers of Gorakhnath’s Hathayoga system. Nath yogis can be distinguished by the horn worn suspended round the neck, by the fillet worn round the top of the head and in their leaders by the necklace suspended from the shoulders to which are attached strips of cloth.

They also wear cloaks often patched, but they do not have any sectarian marks, although they later became Shaivas. Note that at this stage, Nath yogis wear hooped earrings through their earlobes and have not yet become the Kanphat or split-ear yogis who split the actual cartilege of the ear. Other characteristics that mark them out is their long matted hair, piled up into jatas or loose, their nakedness or nearly such, and the smearing of their body with ashes. Note also the yogapattas or meditation bands and the fact that some seem still to wear the sacred thread.

Alongside these historical manuscripts, individual album paintings were also being produced in the Mughal studio in Akbar’s reign. Some of them poke fun at the ascetic tradition that had long existed traditional in Indian culture – in Basavan’s study, from around 1585, talks of a poor shepherd offering flowers to a grotesquely bloated ascetic as he stalks by unheeding; he is followed by an acolyte whose body is as thin as his master’s is the reverse.

A shepherd offers flowers to a holy man. Attributed to Basavan, c. 1585 (British Library J.22, 13)

By 1605, studies of yogis had become so commonplace that they could be added to the marginalia round illustrated manuscripts, as with this nearly naked Nath yogi tending his fire, complete with horn and earrings, from a manuscript of the Divan of Hafiz that was copied by Sultan Ali of Mashhad but beautified with marginal studies at the beginning of Jahangir’s reign.

A Nath yogi as a border decoration. Mughal, 1605 (British Library Or.14139, f. 100v)

Pictures of yogis were especially useful for Mughal artists, since their nakedness could be used as an exercise in depicting the volumes of the human body or alternatively their voluminous robes for an exercise in modelling.

Although Akbar was interested in all religions and especially those of his Indian subjects and of course had numerous Sanskrit texts translated into Persian, it is his son Salim afterwards Jahangir who seems to have had a specific interest in yoga and ascetic practices, although the Library has no representations relevant to Jahangir here.

Instead there are several studies of Nath yogis and other ascetics living in remote places (for example Falk and Archer, Indian Miniatures in the India Office Library, nos. 25-27, 45-46).

It was Jahangir’s grandson and the eldest son of Shah Jahan, Dara Shikoh, born in 1615, who was most famously involved with Hindu philosophy and ascetics. Here are two facing pages from Dara Shikoh’s Album, compiled in the early 1630s just before his marriage, showing two ascetics in yogic postures, attributed to the great artist Govardhan early in his career around 1610.

Both wear long beards and have their uncut hair twisted up on to their head: the one of the right has a Vaishnava sect mark and holds up a manuscript page, the one on the left holds a rosary.

Two ascetics from the Album of Dara Shikoh. Attributed to Govardhan, c. 1610 (British Library Add.Or.3129, ff.11v, 12r)

Govardhan’s famous study from the 1630s, formerly in the Cary Welch collection, of four nearly naked ascetics seated beside a fire seems to have served as inspiration for this study of Nath yogis by Mas’ud, which reproduces in mirror reverse Govardhan’s shrine on the hill and the tree with a group of ascetics seated before a fire. A young ascetic is bringing them food.

A group of Nath yogis. Ascribed to Mas’ud, Mughal, 1630-40 (British Library J.22, 15)

Dara Shikoh is often represented in later paintings meeting ascetics, normally Muslim ones such as Mian Mir and Mulla Shah, but occasionally also Hindu as here. The accompanying inscription suggests that this is Dara Shikoh with La‘l Sahib, who was born in Malwa in the reign of Jahangir, among whose disciples was Dara Shikoh.

The ascetic however in his white robe patched with pieces of variously coloured cloth, his sacred thread and his particular turban with a black fillet wound round a white kulah appears again in an important mid-17th century painting in the V&A Museum showing ten earlier Hindu mystics seated outside a Sufi shrine, where he is named as Kamal and seated beside his supposed father, the 15th century religious reformer Kabir.

An imaginary meeting between Dara Shikoh and Kamal, the son of Kabir. Mughal, early 18th century (British Library J.19, 1)

Both paintings are reproduced in Binyon and Arnold 1921, pls. XVII-XIX and XXII, who note that the two figures are the same but separate their identities according to the inscriptions. Kamal is mentioned in various hagiographical accounts of Kabir’s life and appears more of a spiritual than a biological son, but if he lived it was certainly earlier than Dara Shikoh. His presence here with Dara Shikoh adds weight to Elinor Gadon’s supposition (Facets of Indian Art, p. 157) that this prince was the patron of the V&A picture.

Artists in the Deccani studios were no less interested in portraying yogis than their Mughal counterparts, and they also developed the artistic idea of the female yogi or yogini. The library’s only 17th century image of a Deccani yogi is this magnificent and engimatic study of a royal ascetic wearing the patchwork robe of a yogi, seated on a tiger skin beside a fire and with the crescent moon linking him with the great yogi Shiva himself.

His sword, dagger, club and fakir’s crutch (no less useful as a weapon than a support for meditation) suggest he might be one of the warrior ascetics who roamed India in bands in the 17th and 18th centuries.

A royal ascetic. Deccani, Bijapur, c. 1660 (British Library, J.16, 2)

Yogis and ascetics continued as the subjects of paintings in the late 18th century, but now from the schools of Bengal and Awadh. Images of female ascetics became increasingly common in the later 18th century. They normally wear long gowns and have their hair piled up on top of their head or wear a turban.

They live out in the open with other yogis and attracted devotees just as did their male counterparts, as in this example from the variation of the Awadhi style from Farrukhabad in western UP. Here a group of women have brought fruit and flowers to such a one, watched by other ascetics. A small śivalingam beside her being perpetually lustrated indicates her orientation.

A female ascetic with devotees. Farrukhabad, c. 1770 (British Library J.66, 5)

Yogis and ascetics continued as the subjects of paintings in the late 18th century, but now from the schools of Bengal and Awadh. Images of female ascetics became increasingly common in the later 18th century. They normally wear long gowns and have their hair piled up on top of their head or wear a turban.

They live out in the open with other yogis and attracted devotees just as did their male counterparts, as in this example from the variation of the Awadhi style from Farrukhabad in western Uttar Pradesh. Here a group of women have brought fruit and flowers to such a one, watched by other ascetics. A small sivalingam beside her being perpetually lustrated indicates her orientation.

In another painting from Murshidabad, a noblewoman has brought her child to a hermitage where live two male ascetics, one old the other young, who sit there telling their beads, while a female ascetic, naked to the waist, supports herself on a swing and smokes from a nargila. The fire beside her suggests she is undergoing mortification, standing up supported by the swing while she exposes herself to the heat of the fire.

A noblewoman visiting a group of ascetics. Murshidabad, c. 1770 (British Library Add.Or.5607)

Female ascetics leaning on swings are a feature of several other late 18th century paintings. The whole concept of Hindu female asceticism in India has only fairly recently become the focus of scholarly attention, specifically of anthropologists studying modern communities, but unless we are to believe that these pictorial studies are fantasies, then it clearly is a phenomenon known for several centuries.

This article first appeared on the British Library's Asian and African Studies blog.

The post How ascetics and yogis were depicted in Indian paintings from the Mughal era appeared first on SabrangIndia.

Here are five masterpieces of the Mughal period to reflect upon. In doing so, lets ask the question:  

Do we prefer the inspiring vision of India they provide, and celebrate the cosmopolitan reality that produced these treasures, or do we accept the intolerant and provincial alternative that is unfolding?

The claim that India is a monolithic culture, as reflected in some imagined past, is belied by centuries of artistic production.  The Mughal period brought together talented artists from all regions and religions together to create extraordinary works of art. In their time these works of art provided pride, pleasure and education to their viewers. It is hoped that they will do so again here.

Krishna lifting Mount Govardhan
Illustration to the Harivamsa, Mughal school, around 1585

 
In 1574 the Mughal emperor Akbar (reigned 1556-1605) created a bureau of Records and Translation at Fatehpur Sikri. The aim was to translate important texts, including Hindu epics, into Persian and to illustrate them in the royal workshops. In order to accomplish this task, scholarly Mullahs and Pandits collaborated over a period of several years as Sanskrit texts were reborn in Persian – the Mahabharata became the Razmnama; the Vishnu Purana and Kathasaritsagara were translated; and four illustrated versions of the Ramayana were made –  three for different members of the Mughal royal family and one for a Rajput ally.

For the artists at the Mughal court  (which included Muslims, Hindus, Europeans and women painters) illustrating these manuscripts posed a special challenge because this was an almost entirely new type of imagery. For example, there is no surviving evidence that the Ramayana was illustrated in manuscript form before the 16^th century, so many of these paintings are innovations of the Mughal period.

One masterpiece from the Harivamsa depicts Krishna lifting Mount Govardhan to protect the villagers of Braj from the wrath of Indra (see illustration). At the very center of the painting stands the blue god, executed in the naturalistic Mughal style, but also bearing his attributes of blue skin, vanmala and peacock crown. The mountain above is painted as a mass of stylized rocks, derived from Persian, and ultimately Chinese, painting, and is filled with plants, birds and animals. Clustered below are the villagers of Braj, along with a trio of Mughal courtiers. Among the old men, sadhus, young boys, and women, one female figure on the right is loosely based upon a European print image of the Madonna. Of equal interest is the group of cows in the foreground that are painted with great sensitivity and individualization. While temple sculpture of the period tends to show Krishna using his little finger to lift the mountain, in this painting he performs the miraculous act with the flat of his palm. This small but significant detail shows that the unknown artist was in line with the earliest iconography of this subject, such as in the relief carvings at Mahaballipuram (7^th century AD). The miracle of this and other such works of its kind reflect a simple fact – that Muslim patronage was a vital key to the development of Hindu religious painting.

Meeting of a Muslim and Hindu pilgrim
Folio from the Khamsa of Amir Khusrao Dehlavi,
Mughal school, late 16^th century, by Basawan

 
The verses of the 13^th century Sufi poet Amir Khusrao were illustrated in the late 16^th century at the Mughal court. Among the exceptional artists involved in the project was the master Basawan, who is one of the talents named by Abu’lFazl in his famous chronicle, the ‘Ain-iAkbari. Here Basawan has depicted a tale where a Muslim pilgrim meets a Hindu Brahmin. He asks the Brahmin why he is crawling on the ground who replies that he has turned his heart into a foot and travels upon it in devotion to his deity.

The Muslim pilgrim is so impressed by this show of piety that he removes his own shoes to continue barefoot on his way. Basawan was one of the first Mughal artists to be deeply interested in the European styles of shading, modeling and volume, techniques which can be seen in this painting. The inscriptions visible on the page are by the hand of another Mughal master – the calligrapher Muhammad Husain Kashmiri, whom Akbar titled ‘Zarin Qalam’ or Golden Pen, for his beautiful handwriting.

So we see again a coming-together between Muslim and Hindu on every level, from patron to writer and artist to calligrapher to have made this work possible. How appropriate, especially for a story that essentially is a metaphor for the meeting of Islam and Hinduism in the subcontinent.

Bhairavi Devi worshipped by Shiva
Mughal school, around 1630; Attributed to Payag

The tradition of illustrating Hindu subject matter at the Mughal court continued through the 17th century and from the period of Shah Jahan (reigned 1628-58) another great painting survives, attributed to the Mughal master Payag in about 1630 (see illustration). The subject is the fearsome Devi Bhairavi, shown here in a cremation ground, with Shiva appearing as an ash-covered devotee. Seven funeral pyres burn around, and jackals edge close while the ground is filled with human bones and corpses. The devotee expels a fiery breath, possibly to indicate a mantra, while the goddess herself spews blood, wears skulls, and also varieties of Mughal-style jewelry.

Remarkable for its conceptual depth and iconographical sophistication, close study of the painting has revealed that Payag relied in part on 17^th century European images of the Crucifixion to create the scattered bones in the landscape, and also to create the naturalistic modeling of the figures. The image of the Devi herself may have evolved from an early Mughal illustrated Devi Mahatmya series, although here the rich detail of the iconography is unprecedented. This painting was likely made for Shah Jahan as a gift for the Hindu ruler of Mewar, to which collection it later went and where it got its visible Devanagari inscriptions. This particular goddess is among the rarest images of the Hindu pantheon, yet has emerged in full force at the Mughal court.

Kalamkari tent panel for Mirza Raja Jai Singh of Amber
Probably Burhanpur, 1665 or earlier

 
The beautiful flower at the center of this kalamkari tent panel of the late 17^th century is an imagined plant, as demonstrated by the different blossoms and leaves which grow out of the same stalk (see illustration). This sense of fantasy and imagination is a hallmark of the Deccan schools of art, which flourished under the patronage of the Sultans of the Deccan courts of Bijapur, Golconda, Ahmadnagar, Bidar and Berar. But they were not the only rulers who patronized the great painters and textile dyers of the region. The Mughal and Rajput nobles, perched in the northern Deccan from the early 17^th century in their bid to conquer the region, also employed kalamkari textiles as clothing, furnishing and tent panels, such as this example. This panel was once part of a tent made for Mirza Raja Jai Singh of Amber (reigned 1622-67). His Rajput kingdom, along with many others, was part of the extended Mughal empire. This composite, multi-cultural and multi-faith alliance was poised, under the command of emperor Aurangzeb, to conquer another, equally diverse group of Muslim kingdoms in Deccan India, which they succeeded in doing by 1687.

The styles of art of this period speak of this mix of Mughals, Rajputs and Deccanis. Here the flower is shown beneath a cusped arch with Chinese-inspired clouds in the sky.  The idea of such ornamental flowers took shape in the Mughal world where by about 1640 such motifs were found all over architecture and decorative objects, including in the Deccan and Rajasthan. Not only did Mirza Raja Jai Singh purchase such kalamkaris (as indicated by the Amber toshakhana inventory notes on it and on many examples in Jaipur) but his memorial in the Deccan where he died is executed in the same Mughal inspired aesthetic that we see in this piece. The language of ornament and artistic styles was thus shared across communities, and stands in marked contrasts with the prejudices and preferences being expressed today. 

Aurangzeb on a Palanquin in the Deccan
Mughal School, about 1700, byBhavanidas

 
The Mughal emperor Aurangzeb (reigned 1658-1707) spent the last twenty-five or so years of his life in the northern Deccan, bent upon conquering the Muslim sultanates of the region. He finally succeeded, but he was already an old man by the time he did. This painting by the Hindu artist Bhavanidas portrays him on a palanquin in an open landscape with a royal army in the distance (see illustration). The dramatic hills in the background indicate that the setting is the Deccan, which has a distinctive rocky terrain in some areas. The emperor himself sits on a palanquin which is carried by attendants and also noblemen.

Paying homage to him are noble figures among them probably his son and successor, Bahadur Shah I and his grandson. In the very front of the painting we see preparations for a shikar or royal hunt, with a party of huntsmen dressed in green. While the painting contains visible ink inscriptions in Persian giving the name of the painter Bhavanidas, the artist has also hidden his signature (also written in Persian) in a tiny gold inscription in the green ground, as was often done by Mughal artists.

This important work shows the production of painting in the late Aurangzeb period – one of the most distorted and misrepresented periods of Indian history today. It also demonstrates that the mature style of the period had evolved to encompass historical subjects, observation of daily life, the imperial image, and human portraiture, all of which can be seen here. Bhavanidas continued working in the Mughal atelier until 1719, after which he moved to the Rajput kingdom of Kishangarh and became its premier artist. The famous development of bhakti themed paintings at that court would not have been possible without the Mughal input from artists such as him.

Thus the creative energy of art emerges from the combination of forces, not their separation – a profoundly important message that is deliberately being forgotten today.  The political obsession with a singular identity based on an assumed idea of purity rests on a falsehood about India’s historical past.  The world has witnessed such impulses before and the effects have been devastating.  In India’s case, the loss would be nothing less than the obliteration of its multifaceted and rich culture and history, to be replaced by a fictive distortion of what India was and ought to be. It is hoped that these masterpieces from the past inspire us to remember where India’s greatness lies.

(The author is a historian of Indian and Islamic art. This article is available in five Indian languages with links to high-resolution images of the works of art in on-line versions of the piece)

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