Mughal Treasures

I’m afraid I’m getting back into bad habits over keeping up to date- though I can always blame the 6 Nations rugby for displacing my attention from more cultural events….

I did however manage to fit a visit to the British Library’s exhibition on Mughal India in.   Though supplemented by artefacts from elsewhere ranging from a massive green jade terrapin the size of an adult turtle to the crown of the last Mughal ruler Bahadur II, this was primarily built round the BL’s own collections of Indian manuscripts and book art- a dazzling show overall.

The Mughal dynasty were outsiders to India.   They claimed descent from Timur (better known as Tamerlane in the English speaking world) and, rather tenuously, from Chinghiz Khan himself- in other worlds they laid claim to the Central Asian Mongol/Turkic imperial heritage.  Their own first language was a Turkish dialect, with Persian as the language of high culture and administration.   The founder of the line, Babur, ended up in India only after three failed attempts to get control of Timur’s city of Samarkand in the chaotic succession struggles which filled the century after the great conqueror’s death and seems to have regarded Delhi as a consolation prize which might serve as a springboard for another go.   Well into the 17^th century Mughal rulers still cast covetous eyes northwards beyond the Afghan mountains and tried to assert control in their ancestral homelands- with very limited success.  The art they sponsored never ceased to stress their descent from Timur, though- as the piece below created in the early 17th century shows, with successive Mughal rulers seated at the feet of the old conqueror.

This had an impact on their court style and personnel.  The Mughal court was very open to well born or talented figures from across the wider Asian Islamic world- Afghans, Turks, Uzbeks, Persians and others all found positions there over the years.  Politically this posed problems- ethnically based factionalism was a permanent issue within the Mughal elite and contributed to the rapid collapse of the empire in the 1700s.    In artistic terms however it was a clear positive as styles from well beyond India got a foothold there and hybridised with each other- as well as with local styles and input from much further afield- to create a striking and distinctive artistic culture.

The dynasty nearly came to an end before it got properly started.  Babur died in 1530 just as he was consolidating his power.  His son, Humayun, was plagued by disloyal relatives and external foes; he was driven into exile in 1540 and only clawed his way back to power in Delhi with Persian assistance (always played down afterwards- the Mughals were at least nominally Sunni Muslims and sensitive to the charge that they owned their restoration to the heretical Shia Safavids).   He had just regained control in 1555 when he took a fall in his library and died (I rather warm to a man who appears to have died looking for a book on the top shelf of his massive library….).  Perhaps surprisingly, despite perennial succession issues, the dynasty then entered into its greatest period under the run of rulers conventionally known as the Great Mughals- Akbar I, Jahangir, Shah Jahan and Aurangzeb.  

Shah Jahan (see above) is the one who probably has most name recognition outside India because he was responsible for the construction of the Taj Mahal though Akbar was arguably an even greater builder- he had a whole new capital city built at Fatehpur Sikri near Agra which was used for little more than a decade before he moved to Lahore as a better base for campaigning in Afghanistan.  There were certain commonalities between the first three.   All were somewhat less than orthodox Muslims, prepared to conciliate the Hindu majority of the population with tax concessions and employ Hindu aristocrats in their administration.   This lack of fervour could take interesting turns.   Akbar was given to mystical revelations (the image at the very top shows him having some kind of spiritual revelation in the middle of a hunt and deciding to call the whole thing off- it’s not entirely clear whether this was a one-off or whether he gave up on hunting for good thereafter).  He gave patronage to sufi brotherhoods and Hindu ascetics alike and at times seemed to be working his way towards launching a new religion of his own devising- when not tinkering with the calendar.    Jahangir continued some of these trends but became increasingly addicted to a mix of alcohol and opium.  Shan Jahan was viewed by the Sunni establishment as soft on Shias- the wife for whom he built the Taj Mahal was Persian in origin.

In artistic terms too, all three men were major patrons of the arts and architecture.   Drawing on Persian and Central Asian precedents they sponsored the production of major illuminated manuscripts.  Their subject matter was a fascinating mix.   Dynastic chronicles and panegyric biographies of the rulers sat alongside new editions of Persian literary classics like the poetry of Hafiz or Nawani.   Manuscripts reproduced tales of a mythologised pre-Islamic Persian past which integrated Alexander the Great into the succession of Persian rulers as half-brother to Darius III and therefore also a legitimate ruler presiding over a dazzling court in which Aristotle and Plato bickered over the ultimate meaning of life until the latter became a hermit and (merging into the classical Orpheus) inventor of music on whom the rainbow-plumaged Simurgh bird swooped to carry him off over a countryside bustling with activity.

 Alongside lovingly rendered lives of sufi saints, Akbar sponsored the translation of key Hindu religious texts into Persian.  How far this was religious outreach to the majority population is less clear as the translation and editing process tended to accentuate the already-strong adventure story side of the “Mahabharata” and the “Ramayana” and turn them into fantastical epic tales of romance and battle and strange doings, losing any spiritual content in the process.    The painters working on these commissions were a mixed group.   The court workshop artists were predominantly Muslim but a number of Hindus worked there as well.   As noted above, they blended a wide range of styles into their work- including a surprisingly large European element.  

By the time the Mughals had consolidated their power in northern India, European merchants were frequent visitors to India ports and the Portuguese had established a toehold in Goa which lasted until the 1960’s.   European powers sent ambassadors to the Mughal court; James VI and I’s ambassador Sir Thomas Roe published his memoirs of his time there.  The relatively open religious environment- men like Akbar and Jahangir enjoyed religious debate and were happy to have learned Christian priests around their court- opened up opportunities which Jesuits and other religious orders were happy to take.  There was no Indian equivalent of Giuseppe Castiglione (the Jesuit who served as court painter to the Manchu ruler in China in then 18^th century) but a great deal of European art filtered into Indian artistic circles one way and another alongside the astronomical and mathematical texts prized by the court (in some cases the content had come full circle, with concepts first elaborated in India returning there in European form).  The main vector of influence seems to have come through engravings but it is, for instance, known that an English miniature by Isaac Olivier was much admired in India and influenced subsequent approaches to portraiture.  Mughal artists merged western approaches to perspective with the conventions inherited from Persian art and borrowed motifs wholesale.   This sometimes has strange results.  What is labelled as a Kashmiri village turns out to be a Flemish village (presumably lifted from an engraving) given a light makeover.  A church stands in the background of an Indian pastoral scene.  A cherub which has clearly escaped from a baroque heaven tugs interacts with Jahangir, who was the only person able to see this angelic presence (I wonder what he was on that day…).   The overall result is art of great beauty and sophistication, marked by extremely acute observation of animals and plants and reflecting a bustling, sophisticated court life- though the squrrel catcher below is probably not a courtier in disguise.

Artistically things began to go sour under Aurangzeb.   He fought his way to power in the final years of Shah Jahan’s reign when the old ruler was incapacitated by ill health.  Unlike his immediate predecessors, he played the orthodox Sunni Muslim card for all it was worth- no doubt reflecting a genuine piety (he had the Koran off by heart).   In power he re-imposed discriminatory taxation on the non-Muslim majority and fought endless wars to expand Mughal power into the deep south of the Indian peninsula.    There was precious little state patronage for artists under his reign- one suspects that he would have disapproved even of the portraits which depicted him as a conqueror.  

Since he ruled for some fifty years, the long term impact on court art was pretty devastating as artists drifted away into the service of local grandees with a more tolerant view of painting.   A sense of what got lost can be seen in some of the most exquisite portraits in the show, drawn from a book prepared for Prince Dara Shikoh, Aurangzeb’s main rival executed in 1659. 

Politically his reign was the peak of the Mughal Empire- it never controlled more land than it did when he died in 1707.   Well before his death, however, the cracks were beginning to show.  He spent his final years campaigning deep in the south, far from the Mughal heartlands.  It wasn’t really possible to run the empire from a campaign tent on the remote periphery, however- especially as the crushing taxes imposed to fund the wars sparked protests across the Empire.  Over-extension loomed.   Outsiders- whether traditional rivals in Persia and Afghanistan or newcomers like the English East India Company- were beginning to circle menacingly (the exhibition includes some ill-tempered correspondence between Aurangzeb and William III over the depredations of English pirates on shipping in Indian waters).  

After his death things fell apart with astonishing speed.   Like his contemporary Louis XIV he had outlived his immediate heirs; unlike Louis, succession practices were fluid enough for there to be multiple potential candidates for power.   The empire had seen contested successions before but in this case none of the contenders were talented enough to halt the slide.   By 1739 the empire was so badly weakened that a Persian army was able to sack Delhi and loot the royal library as well as stealing the Peacock Throne of the Mughal rulers.   Though there was something of a revival of court art as the century wore on, many of the most interesting and innovative developments in art were being made at regional power centres like Lucknow, capital of Awdh (one of the intriguing aspects of the exhibition was meeting old friends from the Royal Academy Zoffany show like Colonel Polier in their Indian context). 

It’s perhaps predictable that a lot of the material which ended up in the British Library was commissioned in one way or another by British residents or other figures operating on the still-fluid margins between British and Indian society.   One of the major patrons of art in the early 19^th century was James Skinner, son of a Scottish soldier of fortune and a local woman, who made a career in his father’s profession.   Excluded from a formal East Indian Company commission by his origins, he nevertheless raised and operated a highly effective light cavalry unit kitted out in distinctive mustard coloured uniforms (hence their nicknames “The Canaries” and “The Yellow Boys”).   “Skinner’s Horse” still exists as a regiment in the modern Indian army (officially they’re the 1st Bengal Cavalry- I wonder if their tanks reflect the regimental heritage in their paintwork).  Skinner’s English was fragmentary and he corresponded with British officials in literary Persian- a hybrid figure in a short-lived but fascinating era when such individuals had a major role to play.  Indian artists for their part had become adept at creating art in whatever style the person paying for it wanted( the example below was commissioned by a British collector, for instance); as a result, the later exhibits possibly overstate the “Europeanisation” of Indian artistic practice. 

Politically Mughal power had gone beyond recall.  By 1800 the Mughal ruler controlled little more than the Red Fort in Delhi (see below) and survived on the sufferance of the dominant local powers of the Ganges plains, who claimed a faint sheen of legitimacy by pretending that they were acting as his representatives.   After 1803 this domination passed to the East India Company, whose representatives begin to pop up in pictures of court life and ceremonial in deceptively humble postures which can have fooled nobody- seated on one of the rearmost elephants in a noisy and colourful court procession, for instance.   The political reaction to this slow motion annexation was violent and, from the Mughal point of view, fatal.   When the Company’s sepoy regiments rebelled in 1856-7 they claimed to be seeking to restore the Mughal Empire to its former glory- how far this was a genuine goal rather than the latest example of aspiring political forces claiming legitimacy without the slightest intention of obeying any Mughal order they didn’t like is far less clear.   Bahadur II, a talented poet and a cultured man but not much of a politician, wavered uneasily between the rebel leadership and the British and ended up distrusted by both sides.  When British armies took Delhi he was taken into custody and deposed; the exhibition ends with photographs of the Red Fort taken after the British capture and of Bahadur himself, looking somewhat dazed by the turn of events.  He died in exile shortly afterwards.