Tuesday, May 1, 2012

Princes and Painters in Mughal Delhi 1707-1857

The Asia Society Museum, February 7 – May 6, 2012


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:

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