The Mughal emperors retain a fraught significance in the politics of South Asia today. Pakistan has named nuclear warheads after them, while India has removed their names from streets. But those lucky enough to visit the Victoria and Albert Museum in London this spring will glimpse a forgotten Hindustan that existed before the countless fractures and partitions of recent history.
The exhibition Great Mughals, which is on view until 5 May, has at its heart three absolute monarchs from the house of Tamerlane, whose enlightened patronage of the arts fostered a cultural hybridity that took root among the empire’s elites. No one can agree quite how long that golden age of pluralism lasted, but the present exhibition tells the story through material culture, displaying together for the first time the finest examples of Mughal painting, textiles, metal and tile-work.
Fall-front cabinet, Gujarat (around 1600) © Victoria and Albert Museum, London
The curator Susan Stronge, who is retiring after more than 40 years at the V&A’s Asian department, described the show to The Art Newspaper as her “swansong”.
Exhibitions of Indian, Iranian or “Islamic” art often suffer from a lack of time and place; Persianate art from the Balkans to Bengal shares superficial similarities in themes and appearance across 1,000 years, causing artefacts to be lumped together without reference to the milieux of their creation. Not so in Stronge’s tour-de-force.
She keeps a strict focus on the reigns of three emperors—Akbar, Jahangir, and Shah Jahan—and the “House of Books” they presided over, which she describes as resembling a medieval European scriptorium, a space where dozens of different craftsmen worked to create luxurious Qurans, illuminated manuscripts, and albums of paintings interspersed with calligraphy.
Through conquest and co-option, these rulers turned an unstable Timurid holding in north India into a continental empire. But they also had a profound love of art and culture, reflecting an atmosphere rich in cultural exchange. Stronge puts forward the case that a “new art” was created in Akbar’s royal workshops, which brought together local artisans who had trained in indigenous Indian traditions with emigré artists more versed in the Persianate tradition.
This new art was the product of empire. “The institutionalisation was new”, Stronge says. “For the first time, you had the availability of craftsmen from all over the empire and the means to pay for it.”
The works on display in the exhibition underline the fluidity with which the Moghuls and their subjects construed their identities. It is all Indian art, but there are paintings created for rulers of Turkic descent in a peripatetic Indian court by Iranian artists working alongside Hindu artisans, under European stylistic influence, depicting Ethiopian warlords, Chinese vases or North American wildlife.
An installation view of one of the illuminated manuscripts in the exhibition
Photo: Victoria and Albert Museum, London
To describe these sumptuous paintings as “miniatures” would be unjust, as their physical presence and art-historical stature is enormous. This is especially true of Akbar’s Hamzanama manuscript, a key milestone on the way to the new Mughal art. In one remarkable leaf on display, we can discern two distinct hands at work simultaneously: an Indian and an Iranian.
Works like this would have been held up for the imperial eye to pore over during the literary recitations used for entertainment. Amazingly, Akbar was illiterate, and yet a diligent patron of specific artists, texts, and ideas, to whom the adjective ‘syncretic’ is most often applied. By contrast, his successors were hands-on bibliophiles; in several works here, we can see spidery royal handwriting labelling certain paintings as the work of certain artists, a reminder, too, of the determining imprint of individual artists.
A contemporary chronicler claimed that Akbar employed 100 artists, but, Stronge pointed out, we only have the names of a few dozen, and these were varied in background, style, and predilection. They belonged to families Hindu and Muslim, grand and humble, subscribing to European, Persian and Indian influences.
And we know of at least two artists who were women. The exhibition also includes a vanishingly rare work by a named female artist, Sahifa Banu. As Stronge put it, “we don’t know very much about the male artists, but we know literally nothing about the women”. Nevertheless, the painting is a tantalising glimpse of the level of cultural and economic empowerment enjoyed by elite Mughal women.
The subsequent ownership of these works also blends the local and the global as only empires can; the treasured possessions of the Mughals were later looted by their cultural cousins the Iranians or their imperial successors the British. In Lahore you can see the garden in which Jahangir held his drinking parties, but for the wine-cup and ewer you will have to go to South Kensington.
- The Great Mughals: Art, Architecture and Opulence, Victoria and Albert Museum, London, until 5 May
