Painting during the Sultanate period

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INDO-ISLAMIC ART AND ARCHITECTURE (712-1757)

THE TURKO-AFGHAN SULTANATE OF DELHI (1206-1526)

Painting during the Sultanate period

The Indo-Islamic era brought changes in the practice, scale, format, organization, and genres of painting in India. Monumental sculpture as an art form declined, while wall painting was eclipsed, though not entirely replaced, by small-scale paintings illustrating texts.

Illuminated manuscripts

Around the tenth century, a new phenomenon, the illustrated book, made its appearance around the globe from Chartres through Isfahan to Beijing. Paintings became a portable commodity, private collections were formed, and illustrated books came to denote wealth and prestige. No expense was spared on materials and craftsmanship, Opulently produced manuscripts, bought and sold, presented, cere­monially exchanged, or acquired as war booty, were precious objects which only persons of royal or noble birth could afford. Unlike the communal art of the temple, calligraphers and painters were employed by the scriptoria belonging to patrons of substantial means whose taste became paramount. In particular, Muslim calligraphers who tran­scribed the word of Allah enjoyed a high reputation in a society that prized the art of the book.

Even though writing had been known in India since Asokan times, it had been confined to secular subjects, or to stone and metal inscrip­tions that served as public documents. Sacred texts such as the Vedas were orally transmitted because of the importance of enunciating each word perfectly. In India, the earliest illustrated texts were the tenth­ century Tantric Buddhist treatises, which came out of monasteries at Nalanda in Bihar and Paharpur in Bengal. However, in less than two centuries a flourishing painting tradition grew up on the west coast under the patronage ofJain merchants, who set up great libraries and commissioned artists to illustrate two major texts, Kalpasutra and Kalakacarya Katha.

The Sultanate art of the book introduced paper and effected other changes in Indian painting. The long-held belief that Delhi sultans followed the Sacred Tradition (Hadith) in forbidding the painting of living forms has now been thoroughly disproved. The sultans bought Arabic, Turkish, and Persian texts for their libraries and commissioned new ones. In search of work, scholars and scribes from Baghdad, Bukhara, Samarqand, and other Islamic seats of learning came to Delhi, which acquired renown as an international centre for trade in manuscripts. Although actual paintings from the Delhi Sultanate have not been identified with certainty, we know from contemporary accounts that the sultans had picture galleries where they took their leisure, though the pious Firuz Tughlaq replaced human figures with floral paintings in his own chambers. However, other Tughlaq sultans even tolerated Hindu themes.

The only Sultanate paintings known to have survived are from the provinces. They demonstrate the process of the fusion of Persianl/Near Eastern and Indian painting conventions. The most famous, those illustrating the Ni'mat Nama (Book of Delicacies), were produced for Ghiyas ud-Din Khalji, sultan of Malwa (I469-I500), who, disillu­sioned with war, withdrew from the cares of state. A sixteenth ­century historian writes about this grand eccentric with his Epicurean approach to food and sex. An absolute ruler, he was able to fulfil his fantasies on an unprecedented scale, collecting I6,000 slave girls, dressing some of them in male attire, and teaching them different professions so that only women might serve him. The style of the Ni'mat Nama illustrators seems at first glance to be a provincial variant of Persian painting. A closer look at the treatment of faces and costumes reveals Indian authorship. The hands of two Indian artists, trained by a Persian master, have been identified. The more accom­plished one interprets Persian elements deftly and imaginatively in the light of his own experience. (Paradoxically, the less skilled one copies Persian models more slavishly.) These works are important in that they demonstrate the process by which styles are transferred and assimilated by artists. Here the Indian artist's own conventions act as essential schemata, which are modified in the light of the new style.

The two Indian artists identified as the illustrators of the Ni'mat Nama seem to have been part of a painting tradition that prevailed in north and northwest India during the Sultanate period, particularly between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries, about which we only have sporadic information. Among these artists, the Gujarati ones mentioned earlier are best known among scholars as 'Jain painters' because of the large quantity of Jain subjects painted by them. Paper introduced from Iran and Syria allowed these artists to experiment with formats and dimensions, which had not been possible in narrow, palm leaf manuscripts. Jain merchants and bankers were particularly enthusiastic about commissioning illustrated manuscripts celebrating Jain saints. Many of these were produced with cheap material, their calligraphy and painting bereft of elegance. Their existence strongly suggests that patronage was no longer confined to the wealthy or to royalty but included lesser merchants and people of more modest means.

The so-called Jain painters have lately been reappraised in the light of the complex relationship between Islamic and Indian art and between Hindu/Jain and Muslim patronage. The Jain Kalakacarya Katha tells the story of how the abduction of the saint Kalaka's sister by the king of Ujjain was avenged by an ancient Sahi or Saka (Scythian) king. In ancient India, Sakas and Yavanas were the most prominent foreigners, and Yavana was the term later applied to Arabs and Turks. It is interesting that in some Jain manuscripts the painters represent the ancient Saka king in contemporary Arab costume or with the Mamluk (Islamic Egyptian) painting convention of three-quarter faces and sidelong glances. Conversely, a recently discovered illustrated Indian copy of the Persian epic Shah Nama could be mistaken for a Kalakacarya Katha. There is evidence that 'hybrid' painting styles such as these, and that of the Ni'mat Nama, arose out of the inter­mixture of cultures; the artists, trained in Gujarati workshops, were possibly provided with samples of Persian and Mamluk painting by their Muslim patrons. In the late fifteenth century, the Mediterranean trade was dominated by the Mamluks of Egypt who, in partnership with Gujarati merchants, were the major suppliers of cotton, opium, lac, and other Indian produce to the West.3' Painting on cotton as a major export from Gujarat to Egypt has been amply attested by the discovery of Gujarati textiles in graves in Fostat near Cairo. The recent identification of Mamluk elements in Jain paintings offers further visual evidence of this trading connection.

Secular painting

Illustrated texts, many of them secular, and of a quite different genre, were commissioned by the Muslim and Hindu aristocracy of the six­teenth century: 'Even now, I I remember her eyes I trembling, closed after love, I her slender body limp, I fine clothes and heavy hair loose/ a wild goose I in a thicket of lotuses of passion'. Thus rhapsodized the eighth-century Kashmiri poet Bilhana about his beloved Campavati in the Caurapancasika (Fifty verses of a Love Thief). The gentle eroticism of Bilhana's Caurapancasika marks a turning point in Indian culture, as the formal elegance of high Sanskrit yields to the intimate atmosphere of vernacular literature in Hindi, Bengali, and other provincial languages. Works such as the Rasika Priya of Kesav Das (1555-1617) elaborate a complex typology of ideal lovers and their mental states in which two emotions predominate: the heroine's intense longing for the absent lover and the joy of consummation. A new canon of feminine beauty permeates literature and art, according to which women are celebrated as passionate lovers, braving stormy nights and untold hazards to keep their rendezvous. These romantic lyrics offer a new outlet for Bhakti or devotional religion, in which the intensity of love outside marriage becomes a metaphor for the desire of the soul (Radha) for God (Krsna).

The Caurapancasika inspired a major series of paintings that became the benchmark for pre-Mughal art, not least because this set was the first to be discovered by modern scholars. Over the years many more have come to light that give us an ever clearer idea about painting in North India on the eve of Mughal conquest. A 'transparent' narra­tive device in the Caurapancasika, which tells the story by placing the aristocratic hero and heroine in an everyday architectural interior, becomes a long-lasting convention. These paintings essentially belong to the romantic world of Rajasthan that was foreign to Jain piety. Since most Hindu kingdoms were on the defensive in the sixteenth century, it is likely that they were produced in the independent Rajput kingdom of Mewar.

This painting tradition turned for inspiration to the Bhakti poems of Jayadeva and other poets. Ostensibly religious, the paintings capture the leisurely life at the courts of the Rajput kingdoms of northwest India, especially from the seventeenth century onwards. A related genre is the Ragamala ('garland of musical modes') painting, perhaps the most perfect marriage of literature, music, and painting. The modes of classical Indian music are conventionally divided into six male ragas, each having six wives, the 36 raginis. Each personification; of these modes evokes a particular mood related to the time of the day or the season, a number of which found expression in painting.

Literature and painting such as this might have remained parochial without the growing rapprochement of Hindu and Muslim cultures.

in the fourteenth century. Initially the conquerors had kept aloof from Hindu culture; Hindus on their part considered anybody outside the caste system as beyond the pale. The first signs of synthesis are evident in the work of the Indo-Turkish poet Amir Khusraw (1253-1325). Muslim Sufis and Hindu Bhakti saints began building bridges between the two communities. Syncretic movements such as the Satya Narayana cult (a blend of the Muslim saint Satya Pir and the Hindu god Vishnu) appealed to Hindu and Muslim villagers alike, as the sayings of the Muslim mystic Kabir came to be universally quoted in India. In the fourteenth century the Sufi Maulana Dau'd's text Candayana uses the story of the adulterous love of Laurak and Canda to inculcate the synthesis of Bhakti and Sufi doctrines.

The conventions of Jain sacred painting, modified in the secular Caurapancasika paintings as well as in illustrations to Muslim texts, are now known to have affected a much larger area of northern and central India than had hitherto been assumed. The style can also be seen in wall paintings at Man Singh's palace in Gwalior. In short, it is not correct to hold, as some do, that Jain painters influenced the paintings of Muslim Malwa and Hindu Rajasthan. These painters, perhaps the majority from western India, were professionals who adjusted their style according to the particular needs of their clients, whether Jain, Hindu, or Muslim. The experience of these painters, who were to join the Mughal emperor Akbar's workshop, proved to be valuable in the formation of Mughal painting.

The Mughal Empire (1526-1757)

The Mughal court and state

The Mughal empire was one of the three great empires of the sixteenth century, along with those of Charles V of Spain and the Chinese Son of Heaven. The Mughals brought about qualitative changes in Indian society that were global in scope, anticipating a secular, pluralistic out­look that we tend to associate with our age. The landed classes had been in decline in a number of societies, giving rise to the rule of absolute monarchs, whose power base was an efficient, loyal bureau­cracy. The impersonal state, whose urbanism, individualism, and 'objective' approach to nature laid the foundations of 'modernity', is more commonly associated with Renaissance Florence (C.1400-1600), but the same phenomena could be discerned during the Edo period in Japan (c.I600-1868) and in Mughal India (1526-1757). Yet it is not easy to understand why this burgeoning 'modernity' in Mughal India failed to take firm roots. Mughal 'urban' culture remained the personal achievement of the monarchs and the court. Lacking the social infrastructure that a large professional class, for instance, would have pro­vided, these developments could not be sustained. Noble households dominated the urban economy in a patron-client relationship between the sovereign and the aristocracy, especially in the later period. The artisans attached to workshops essentially served these dominant groups.' Other impediments to 'modernity' included the Hindu caste system, which discouraged social mobility, and the Mughal law of inheritance, whereby an official's personal property reverted back to the emperor after his death. Although this was a disincentive to wealth accumulation and encouraged conspicuous consumption, the 'urban' outlook itself had a powerful impact on Mughal patronage.

Contemporary literature bears witness to a new curiosity about everyday life that was a product of heightened individualism. Mughal autobiographies and diaries, written not only by monarchs but also by the ladies of the harem, were comparable in their lively detail and immediacy to Lady Murasaki's Tales of Genji and Bocaccio's Decameron. Babur (emperor 1526-30), the founder of the Mughal dynasty, reveals his enthusiasms, admits his mistakes with disarming candour, and offers penetrating observations about life around him. For much of present-day India, the refined urbanity and elegant lifestyle of the Mughal court, its standards of haute cuisine and its codification of Indian classical music remain the essential benchmark. Mughal blood sports were taken up by the British Raj, as was the game of polo. Mughal emperors took their sartorial elegance as seriously as their collections of curiosa, jewellery, and precious objects of jade and hardstone.

Mughal curiosity about science and technology was a sixteenth-century phenomenon. Mughal artillery proved decisive in battles, even though firearms had been introduced in the Deccan a century earlier through contacts with Iran and Syria. The age witnessed a rapid devel­opment in global communication, in part the result of European expansion. European travellers, some of them Jesuits, made their way to the Chinese and Mughal empires, which resulted in the exchange of objects and modes of thinking between the cultures. In India, however, curiosity about western things and ideas was confined to the Mughal emperor and his courtiers and did not filter down to other groups.

During the Mughal period the incipient 'urbanism' affected the subject matter of art, hitherto the preserve of the three great religions, Buddhism, Hinduism, and Islam. Mughal painting expressed a lively engagement with the external world, which may be loosely termed, 'realism'. Renaissance mimesis is universally familiar as the cornerstone' of western art history, yet a similar concern was expressed in Mughal , history painting and portraiture. The art of the book had transformed patronage during the Sultanate, a process that reached a climax during: the Mughal era. Art became an autonomous activity, fostering a close I relationship between the patron and the artist; it ceased to be a communal concern. The Mughal emperors were fervent patrons of the arts, their multifaceted personalities informing their patronage­- Akbar, the brilliant creator of a vast efficient empire; Jahangir, the en­dearing hedonist; and Shah Jahan, the royal architect and avid collector of precious objects-each was unique in his personal style of patronage. Yet, in at least one instance, patronage was not confined to royalty but included a grandee of the realm.

The reign of Akbar

Two cultural streams flowed in the veins of Akbar's grandfather, Babur, the founder of the Mughal empire: the Turko-Mongol tradition of his ancestors, Chinghis Khan and Timurlang, Marlowe's 'scourge of God', and the Persian culture which had deeply impressed the Mongols. A ruthless soldier, Timurlang had a weakness for beautiful things, collecting artisans from all over Asia in order to turn his capital, Samarqand, into a cultural wonder. Babur's temperament, as is evident from his remarkable autobiography, is an expression of this mixed heritage of violence and refinement, a characteristic shared in varying degrees by all three early emperors.