MUGHAL MINIATURES AND ENGLISH ENLARGEMENTS
Embedded within The Asia Society
website is another site for the “Princes and Painters” exhibition of miniatures
and other artifacts of the late Mughal dynasty.
The site is worth studying before visiting the exhibition because by
doing so one won’t have to read the long texts that accompany the works, having
learned about their historical context in advance. But without this historical foregrounding,
the crux of the exhibition—the transition from late Mughal to early British
patronage of the arts in India in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries—might
very well be missed. So rather than getting
a major headache from reading too much in a dimly lit space, one can enjoy the
minor headache of looking exclusively at the art—objects well worth close
scrutiny.
The
historical information can’t be ignored because, in the end, there is an
amazing, mind-altering lesson to be learned from the exhibition: a historical lesson
rolled into a paradox and bound up in a contradiction. As the various scholars, curators, museum
spokeswomen and spokesmen seem at pains to inform us (including guest curator William
Dalrymple, author of City of Djinns
and White Mughals, art historian
Yuthika Sharma, and Melissa Chiu, director of the museum), the works on display
were never considered the apogee of Mughal artistry or brilliance. Although
this attitude is occasionally borne out by the work on display, it is also thrown
into doubt at others, as if the Peacock Throne of artistic truth had suddenly
been wrested from the clutches of common sense and turned over to the conceit
of scholars, who turn out to have been very wise after all.
In
the first rooms one is treated to a résumé of works of the early Eighteenth
Century. Many of these were produced by
the same ateliers patronized by the great Mughal rulers of the preceding
century, rulers who combined the despotic genes of the Mongol Khans with the Persian
Timurids (eponymous descendants of Tamburlaine, as popularized in two tragedies
by Christopher Marlowe). Every student
of world history will remember Babur, Humayun, Akbar the Great (religious
syncretist and builder of uninhabitable pleasure domes like Fatepur Sikri), Jahangir,
and of course Shah Jehan (builder of the Taj Mahal, the Red Fort, and other
architectural wonders), culminating in the loathèd Aurangzebe (also popularized
in the English theater, this time by John Dryden on rather positive terms). Although Aurangzebe is usually dismissed as a
religious zealot, a cultural helot, and a ruthless expansionist, some of the
first works to be seen in the show were created under his patronage of the
Delhi workshops. Indeed, their visual
eloquence undermines the conventional wisdom that he was little more than a philistine
and a murderer (to his credit, he merely imprisoned his father—and that in the
Agra Fort just across the river from his beloved Taj Mahal). Perhaps the most exquisite example is the
equestrian portrait of the aging emperor, holding a spear and wearing a
scimitar under his patterned green tunic as he sits, in profile, astride a pale
horse with black mane and hooves, the cream-colored haunches elegantly curved
like a pair of italic parentheses, as a young attendant raises a fringed
parasol from behind the horse to shield the old pillager from the setting sun, signified
by orange wisps of cloud against a grey background.
What
followed Aurangzebe’s reign was a period of rapid and violent transition,
punctuated by more murders, imprisonments, court intrigues climaxing in at
least one quick blinding, some very slow starvation, and the complimentary
strangulation of various Mughal potentates at the bequest, it would seem, of
two fraternal wazirs, as the painted
record implies (though the curators offer no definitive conclusions about that). Nevertheless, the grand ateliers continued to
commemorate the intervening episodes with consummate grace, courtly episodes in
which power was passed on from ruling emperor to favorite grandson, for
instance, in the form, say, of a pretty sarpech: a pearl ornament pinned on a turban. The formal representation of this scene at
the court of Bahadur Shah I (r. 1707 -1712) seems to capture a world of ritual exactitude
and barely-repressed chaos, with the emperor presiding on his dais as four
rival sons sit cross-legged at his feet on a rich Persian carpet. In another work, Grand Wazir Khan and his
attendants sit debating in pajamas among pillows and bolsters while musicians perform
in the foreground as one or two officials in white skirts enter from the right
looking like whirling dervishes, except that they are not whirling. It’s like a modern sleepover in which all the
guests are bearded officials, except at this pajama party the interiors are
elegantly decorated with niches and vases, the furnishings quaintly rendered out
of perspective.
But there are
other genres of works, including such things as elephant fights for the
entertainment of Emperor Muhammad Shah I (r. 1719-1748) who is shown in profile
and well-protected from the mammoth fury below in his high window perch. One supposes these fights were the Mughal
equivalent of the bear-baiting being done at the same time in monarchical
England, which also liked to indulge in cruelty to animals. Other more delicate genres include Hindu
themes, notably represented in the so-called ragas or raginis, male and
female inflections of painterly modes related to music and dance, much as Poussin
might paint a picture in the Lydian, Phrygian, or other such mode associated
with Hellenic forms. In one particularly
charming work, a beautiful lady, clothed in sheer garments revealing breasts
and thighs, visits a Saivite shrine (that looks remarkably mosque-like) to
leave an offering at an almost miniscule lingam, while an austere yogini looks on. The painting seems a tribute to Mughal
tolerance, but an acknowledgement, also, of a desire to reduce the signs of
cultural difference to a minimum.
As
one studies these exquisite, almost jewel-like miniatures, one imagines the
vast wealth of India waiting to be snatched up by some very shrewd and
enterprising scoundrels.
Enter, the British
East India Company! Their representatives’
names seem pregnant with imperial know-how while concealing a remarkable
virtuosity at assimilating Mughal tastes (if partly for the purpose of
extirpating the dynasty): Sir David
Ochterlony, a Boston Tory transferred to the eastern colonies, Sirs Charles and
Thomas Metcalfe, the lordly William Frazer of Inverness, and finally Colonel
James Skinner of Scottish-Rajput descent.
Of the many adventurers who fled Britain for the colonies, not a few of
these eccentric “Residents” went perfectly native
before it would be considered a sure symptom of the heart of darkness. Yet four of the aforementioned gentlemen seem
to have done so with consummate aesthetic judgment (indeed the portrait of the
youthful Frazer by Henry Raeburn on loan from the Met bespeaks the young man’s unmistakable
self-confidence and sense of entitlement).
Admittedly the early commissions by British patrons reflect conventional
Mughal-style formatting and imagery with the awkward addition of some bicorned
British officer at an otherwise average-looking imperial durbar. But when we come to the selected works of the Frazer
Album, an illustrated book commissioned by Resident Ochterlony’s assistant and eventual
replacement, the viewer finds himself or herself curiously unsettled by a surprising
fusion of representational impulses derived from East and West. Two illustrations leap off the walls of the
exhibition: the first, a meticulous
rendering of a village in Rania, the home of Frazer’s Indian mistress and
Anglo-Indian children. The painting
seems to combine elements of the Mughal miniature tradition with a new desire
to catalogue the ordinary details of rural life, a kind of primitivist minutia
that only makes sense when we learn that Resident Frazer, as intimately involved
as he was with the people of the region, also sometimes exacted from his
painters a visual inventory of a landscape’s taxable properties, from chimneys
to water buffalos. But an even more
extraordinary work is found in the group portrait of tax collectors and village
elders accompanied by Frazer’s secretary and scribe, seated a little to the
right of the others. The miniature
portraits are rendered with an amazing artistic sensitivity that conveys
extraordinary psychological depth, though the mostly anonymous faces of the
collected “Zumeendars in Cutcherry” stare blankly out at us from a lost world,
rarely glimpsed but for Frazer’s efforts to make a visual record of the lower
strata of Indian society in the early Nineteenth Century. Whether for posterity or revenue assessment,
it hardly seems to matter. We end up feeling
strangely indebted to these thrifty, cross-cultural cads.
One
of the principle painters in the employ of Colonel Skinner (a sort of courtly
warlord and go-between of mixed heritage for the East India Company and Mughal
dynasty in its last spasms of expediency) was Ghulam Ali Khan who added a
martial weightiness and panoramic breadth to the representation of Skinner’s rather
self-important diwans and regimental parades at Hansi. The assimilation of English tastes seems
virtually complete in a beautiful watercolor landscape by artist Mazhar Ali
Khan depicting the scruffy outskirts of Old Delhi, or “Shahjahanabad” as it was
called in 1845, with the walls of the Red Fort spreading like a knotted ribbon
on the horizon with the minarets and domes of the Jama Masjid to the west, a
grand mosque of Mughal construction which can still be visited by almost anyone
between the frequent calls to prayer.
The most interesting works to follow are the great pre-Mutiny maps and
360-degree panoramic views of Delhi, also painted by Mazhar and probably
commissioned by Thomas Metcalfe whose private bungalow is identified among
others (in both Urdu and English) in the Civil Lines neighborhood, recently
constructed to the west of the fort. An
elegant and extensive scroll map along with Felice Beato’s photographs of the
city provide a record of what remained after the British siege in 1857, a city
whose elite quarters were “tragically dynamited” the following year, as the
curators inform us. The exhibition
concludes with an overview of the Mutiny itself and the fate of the last Mughal
emperor, Zafar, famously pictured in captivity, a broken man lying in bed and
smoking a huqqa, his glassy old eyes peering out at us or perhaps only at the photographer’s
contraption before him.
But
not to fear—New Delhi will soon rise up with the help of Edwin Lutyens, and so
on and so on. The Mughal Period is over;
it will take another century before Allen Ginsberg and Peter Orlovski will arrive
to redeem the country...
The
exhibition also includes illustrations from the Tashrih-al-aqvam album, an “ethnograpthic, biographic, and
topographic” study of the different Hindu castes, occupations, mendicant
groups, Indian religions in the Delhi area, and several princely families, the
list goes on, all translated into Persian by Skinner and illustrated in an
awkward attempt at realism that, frankly, reminds one of the American
primitivists—i.e., anatomically inaccurate and basically amateurish. Here the fusion of cultural tendencies seems
to go astray and leaves one wishing the Delhi masters had taken some courses at
the Royal Academy. But despite this
rather flat conclusion, the show is amazing.
The
exhibition will close very soon (May 6, 2012), so make a point of visiting this
weekend. Also visit the Asia Society
Museum exhibition website before you go:
