Asian and African studies blog

Previous posts on the subject of late Mughal or Delhi miniature paintings on ivory have dealt with portraits, with which the Visual Arts collection is well endowed. Not so well represented in the earlier collection are topographical paintings on ivory, so it was especially gratifying to be able to acquire two superb examples of the genre during my time as Curator of Visual Arts.


A view of the Qutb Minar from the east. By the Delhi artist, Ismail Khan, 1860-65. Water-colour on ivory: oval, 175 x 140 mm, within a gilt frame, and framed in a velvet-lined case, 34 by 30 cm. Engraved on a gilt strip inside frame: The Khutub Minar Delhi. Ismail Kahn. Royal Painter (British Library, Add.Or.4692)

A view by Ismail Khan of the Qutb Minar from the east is especially rich in topographical details. The tower was begun by Qutb al-Din Aybak in 1193 as a minaret to his adjacent mosque and as sign of his victory over Prithviraj Chauhan, the Hindu king of Delhi and Ajmer. Three more storeys were added by his son-in-law and successor Iltutmish. The topmost storey was struck by lightning in 1368 and the repairs by Firoz Shah Tughluq divided that storey into two and partly faced them in marble. The screen of the Quwwat al-Islam mosque also built by the first two monarchs stretches across the background. In front of the central arch of the mosque screen is the famous Iron Pillar, a 4th-century wonder of Gupta-period metallurgy, brought from elsewhere and placed in this site most probably by one of the previous Hindu rulers. On the left is the octagonal Mughal tomb of Adham Khan built in 1562 in the style of the previous Lodhi dynasty. Adham Khan (d. 1562) was the son of Akbar’s wet-nurse Maham Anga and killed on his orders after he assassinated Akbar’s general Ataga Khan. Despite his transgressions, Akbar built him this lavish tomb, which is now surrounded by the buildings of Mehrauli. Nearer is the gateway known as the Alai Darwaza built by Ala al-Din Khilji in 1311 along with part of his colonnade of re-used temple pillars in his bid to double the size of the mosque. In the foreground is Major Robert Smith’s re-sited cupola that crowned the top of the Minar in his repairs to earlier damage in 1828 and taken down and re-sited here in 1847. It was moved again in 1914 to a garden south-east of the Minar.

A letter accompanying the painting dated 21 September 1881 records the gift of the painting to Arthur Tite by the original purchaser D.A. Traill Christie, both men having worked for the Bengal Central Railway in India:

Meantime I send herewith for your acceptance the Indian miniature I spoke of the framing of which was delayed in consequence of my own exigeances (sic) & which I think you will like. It is a genuine work of Ismail Khan’s bought by myself from Delhi in 1865 and has been pronounced by several connoisseurs one of the finest examples of the art. Its Eastern origin & associations will be an appropriate souvenir to recall to you the establishment of the Bengal Central.

Ismail Khan was one of the famous artists of Delhi in the second half of the 19th century. Val Prinsep, who visited India in 1876-7, wrote in his journal (Prinsep 1879, p. 47):

Today I have received visits from the artists of Delhi: they are three in number, and each appears to have an atelier of pupils. The best is one Ismael Khan. Their manual dexterity is most surprising. Of course, what they do is entirely traditional. They work from photographs, and never by any chance from nature. Ismael Khan showed me what his father had done before photography came into vogue, and really a portrait of Sir C. Napier was wonderfully like, though without an atom of chic or artistic rendering. I pointed out to the old man certain faults - and glaring ones - of perspective, and he has promised to do me a view of the Golden Temple without any faults. “These”, he said, pointing to his miniatures, “are done for the sahibs who do not understand. I know they are wrong, but what does it matter? No one cares. But I will show you that I can do better.” This better miniature I never received; perhaps my friend Ismael found it not so easy to do a perfect picture

Lockwood Kipling suggests in the Delhi Gazetteer of 1883 that photographs were photographically enlarged or diminished to the right size, before having their outlines traced on transparent talc: ‘this tracing is then retraced in the reverse side of the talc with transfer ink and transferred to a thin sheet of ivory, the features, etc., are then touched up and finally shaded and coloured. ... As the whole work is done with water-colour any part can be washed out and redone.’ (Archer and Archer 1955, pp. 70-71)

Left: Sir Charles James Napier. Attributed to Ghulam Husayn Khan, c. 1850, after Comte Hippolyte Caïs de Pierlas. Watercolour on ivory, 55 by 45 mm (British Library, Add.Or.5638)   Right: Sir Charles James Napier. By Richard James Lane, after Comte Hippolyte Caïs de Pierlas. Lithograph, 1849. 203 by 163 mm (National Portrait Gallery NPG D21721)

A recently acquired portrait miniature of Sir Charles Napier (1782-1853) gives visual expression to Prinsep’s opinion. Napier was Commander-in-Chief of the Bombay Army famous for his capture of Sind in 1843 (‘peccavi’ he is supposed to have telegraphed to Calcutta). He left India in 1847 but returned as Commander in Chief in 1849. The face is fine, but the shoulders are too close together and the decorations are worn too high up on the chest. He is wearing the star and sash of a Knight Grand Cross of the Order of the Bath (GBC) conferred in 1843 and the Sind Campaign Medal of that same year, as well as other medals connected with his earlier career in the Peninsular War. The long forked beard has gone awry, since the artist is dependent not on a photograph, as Prinsep suggests, but on a lithographic print.

The original artist of the portrait, Caïs de Pierlas, was a plantsman and amateur artist based in Nice and he seems to have met Napier in 1848 - the inscription states that the original drawing was done in that year. An oil painting by him of Napier on a rearing horse meant to be at the Battle of Miani in 1843 appeared at Christie’s South Kensington on 29 September 2011, lot 239. The details of the beard are not clear in the lithographic portrait nor are there any medals, but the latter must have been copied from other prints. The artist of our miniature is almost certainly Ghulam Husayn Khan, who painted both in oils and in watercolour on ivory in the mid-century, although Ismail Khan is thought to be the son of the topographical artist Mazhar ‘Ali Khan (see below).

The Qutb Minar. Albumen print by Samuel Bourne, mid-1860s (British Library, Photo 11(68))

At first sight Ismail Khan’s view reproduces the photographs of the Qutb Minar taken by John Murray and by Robert and Harriet Tytler in 1858 and by Samuel Bourne in the 1860s. All three images are almost identical in composition: reproduced above is the Bourne version. Only one structure would have allowed this viewpoint at that time, the so-called Garhgaj (literally ‘elephant-house’), near the Mughal caravanserai to the east of the Qutb enclosure, a stepped pyramidal structure constructed by Sir Thomas Theophilus Metcalfe when Agent at the Delhi Court, who had converted the nearby Mughal tomb of Adham Khan’s brother, Muhammad Quli Khan, into a summer retreat. All 19th century photographs of the Qutb Minar taken from this point show a tangle of trees intervening across the foreground, making a picturesque view, but not appealing much to an artist trained in the Mughal tradition. Ismail Khan has therefore opened up the foreground, by reducing the size of the trees, thus allowing him to incorporate part of the southern colonnade of ‘Ala’ al-Din’s early 14th century extension to the mosque enclosure to the east of his gateway, as well as a pathway coming in from the viewer’s left; both innovations increase the sense of depth in the painting, as well as conforming to the higher viewpoint beloved of Indian artists.

Ismail Khan must not, however, be supposed to have been so radical an innovator that he actually stood on the Garhgaj to record the view. The lower part of the painting is based on views by Delhi artists of the 1840s, first taken for Syed Ahmed Khan’s publication on the monuments of Delhi Asar al-Sanadid, published with woodcut illustrations in 1847. The woodcut of the Qutb Minar between pp. 128-9 is of this same view, complete with the broad path and the colonnade; the latter also appear in two large water-colours, one in the Visual Arts collections (Add.Or.3100, Archer 1972, no. 162) and another in the Marquis of Dufferin and Ava’s collection (reproduced Welch 1978, no. 51). While making use of both sources, the early photograph for the upper part of the painting and the earlier Indian artists’ views for the foreground, Ismail Khan has imposed his own sense of proportion and landscape.

The second topographical painting on ivory shows a view of the Mughal city of Shahjahanabad or Delhi from the north-west with the River Yamuna beyond.


Delhi from the north-west. Attributed to Mazhar ‘Ali Khan, c. 1845. Water-colour and body-colour on ivory; 105 by 210 mm (British Library, Add.Or.5476)

The view is taken from the Ridge and encompasses the northern and eastern walls of the city: St. James’s Church (built by Col. James Skinner and consecrated 1836), Shah Jahan’s Red Fort itself (finished 1648) and the older fort of Salimgarh (built 1545-54) beside it, and Shah Jahan’s Jami‘ Masjid (built 1650-56) are prominent. Lesser mosques visible include the Akbarabadi Masjid (to the right of the Fort, demolished in 1858) and the Fatehpuri Masjid (far right), both built by two of Shah Jahan’s wives.

Outside the walls along the river, there are seen the back views of the Qudsia Bagh (a garden built by Qudsia Begum c. 1748) and two British structures: Metcalfe House and Ludlow Castle on the extreme left, which were the private residence and the official home of the Agent and Delhi Commissioner Sir Thomas Theophilus Metcalfe from 1835-53. For details of these buildings, see Losty 2012, figs. 2 and 16. The tents visible on the tract outside the north wall are those of the military cantonment. Perspective is most skilfully handled in the recession of the foreground dotted with trees, rocks and animals. A second version of this view also on ivory is in the Victoria and Albert Museum (Dalrymple and Sharma 2012, no. 71). 


Sir Thomas Metcalfe's ‘Delhi Book’ illustrating Delhi from the north-west. Attributed to the studio of Mazhar ‘Ali Khan, c. 1842-44. Water-colour on paper. Folio size: 25 by 19 cm; painting 8 by 13 cm (British Library, Add.Or.5475, f. 11v, detail)

A similar view of Delhi from further back along the Ridge is placed in the ‘Delhi Book’ of Sir Thomas Theophilus Metcalfe, about which Metcalfe complains: ‘The artist in his endeavour to do much has been more minute than clear in his delineation.’ The two versions on ivory seem a riposte by Mazhar ‘Ali Khan himself, availing himself of the minute and delicate brushstrokes possible on this medium. He was the major topographical artist in late Mughal Delhi, painting many of the topographical views in Metcalfe’s ‘Delhi Book’ and also the great panorama of the city of 1846 (Add.Or.4126, see Losty 2012). While there is no direct evidence that Metcalfe was the patron of this view, any more than there is for the panorama, since both begin their views with Metcalfe House on the left it would seem very possible.

Further reading:

M. Archer, Company Drawings in the India Office Library, 1972
M and W.G. Archer, Indian Painting for the British 1770-1880, London, 1955
Dalrymple and Y. Sharma, Princes and Painters in Mughal Delhi, 1707-1857, Asia Society, New York, 2012
J.P. Losty, Delhi 360°: Mazhar Ali Khan’s View from the Lahore Gate, Lustre Press Roli Books, New Delhi, 2012
Prinsep, Imperial India: an Artist’s Journals, London, 1879
Y.D. Sharma, Delhi and its Neighbourhood, Archaeological Survey of India, New Delhi, 1974
S.C. Welch, Room for Wonder, New York, 1978

J.P. Losty, Curator of Visual Arts (Emeritus)

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The Jain manuscripts currently in the British Library collections have a long history and were formerly held by two distinct institutions, the British Museum and the India Office Library.

Built over a period of more than two and half centuries, from the earliest acquisitions of 1753 (in the British Museum’s Sloane and Harley collections), to the latest in 2005, the collection includes works in Sanskrit, Prakrit, Hindi, Gujarati and Rajasthani and in view of its size (over 1000 items), range of material and state of preservation, it is one of the most important outside India.

Aḍhāī-dvīpa, ‘Two and a half continents’. Painting on cloth, 18th century (British Library Or 13937) 

Most of the Jain manuscripts originally belonged in several individual collections acquired in India during the 19^th century by Indologists and employees in the service of the East India Company (among them H.T. Colebrooke, G. Bühler, W. Erskine, H. Jacobi, C. Mackenzie, A.C. Burnell). The subject areas and literary traditions represented are numerous and diverse: canonical, ethics, ritualistic, narrative, astronomy, astrology, mathematics and music. 33 Jain manuscripts are now available online in Digitised Manuscripts.

Miniature of Gautamasvāmin seated, in the typical Śvetāmbara monastic dress and holding a rosary, 15th century (British Library Or 2126A) 

The selection includes rare and valuable palm leaf manuscripts such as Or 1385B, the oldest Jain manuscript in the British Library dated 1201 CE, several Kalpasūtra versions, some of them illuminated (i.e. Or 11921, Or 14262 and Or 13959),  and a 15^th century manuscript of the Śrīpāla-kathā (Or 2126A) and IO San 3177, which contains the manuscript used by Hermann Jacobi for his edition, translation and glossary of the Kālakācārya-Kathānakam of 1880 (at that time the only known written version of the legend). Finely illustrated, it is also an amazing example of Jain calligraphy.

Folio from the Saṁgrahaṇīratna by Śrīcandra in Prakrit with interlinear Gujarati commentary. The miniature depicts the Pancaparameṣṭhins on Siddhaśilā, 17th century (British Library Or 2116C) 

Beside poetical compositions like the Ādityavāra-kathā (Or 14290),  there are cosmological treatises such as Śrīcandra’s Saṁgrahaṇīratna (Or 2116C) and three Aḍhāī-dvīpa (‘Two and a half continents’), illuminated diagrams representing the world inhabited by human beings according to Jain cosmology (Add Or 1812, Add Or 1814 and Or 13937).

More digitised Jain manuscripts from the British Library and other collections in the UK are available at Jainpedia: the Jain universe online.

Further reading

Nalini Balbir ... [et al.], Catalogue of the Jain manuscripts of the British Library: including the holdings of the British Museum and the Victoria & Albert Museum. London: British Library & Institute of Jainology, 2006.

Hermann Jacobi, "Das Kālakācāryakathānakam", Zeitschrift der Deutschen Morgenländischen Gesellschaft 34 (1880), pp.247-318. 

Pasquale Manzo, Asian and African Studies

Continuing the theme set by its acclaimed recent exhibition - West Africa: Word, Symbol, Song – the British Library will be challenging preconceived ideas about Africa and the broader global South with another event. This time, in conjunction with the Academic Book of the Future project, we will be hosting the conference The Academic Book in the South on academic book production.

At the British Library we spend a lot of time dealing with the changing world of academic publications. We have extensive collections of academic books published all over the world. We acquire books from across the global South, in all major languages, and our historic and contemporary holdings are very strong. The book covers shown below give a flavour of these collections.

Left: ʻAbd al-Munʿim Mājid, Nuẓum al-Fāṭimīyīn wa-rusūmuhum fī Miṣr (Cairo: Maktabat al-Anjlū al-Miṣrīyah, 1973); Right: Luṭfī Jaʻfar Faraj ʻAbd Allāh, ʻAbd al-Muḥsin al-Saʻdūn wa-dawruhu fī tārīkh al-ʻIrāq al-siyāsī al-muʻāṣir (Baghdad: Wizārat al-Thaqāfah wa-al-Funūn, al-Jumhūrīyah al-ʻIrāqīyah, 1978)
These two 1970s texts deal respectively with the Fatimid dynasty in Egypt (973-1171) and the history and politics of modern Iraq. In Arabic 

As the publishing environment changes radically, we know that our thinking about the future of academic publications and, more broadly, effective dissemination of academic thought is incomplete without a truly global dialogue. After all, academic research is geared more than ever to tackle global challenges. This is an exciting ambition across all academic disciplines – from improving health outcomes across the world to finding new paradigms for politics, economics and culture in a fast-changing world.

If this ambition is to be realised, it has to include an effective global system to disseminate new academic ideas in all their diversity. This is why we need to build and strengthen our understanding of academic book authorship, publication and circulation, through dialogue with colleagues in Africa, the Middle East and South Asia.

Sabitendranātha Rāẏa, Kaleja Sṭrīṭe sattara bachara (Kalakātā: Dīpaśikhā Prakāśana, 2006-2008). A memoir on the book trade and literature in Kolkata. In Bengali

While our contacts across the world tell us that there are common challenges, there is a lot that we do not know. This is why we are pleased to host The Academic Book in the South, a two-day conference taking place at the British Library on 7th-8th March 2016. This event will investigate the current situation and future prospects of the academic book in the global South.

This event will offer a unique opportunity to hear from the speakers and participants across Africa, South Asia and the Middle East, including: Walter Bgoya, Sukanta Chaudhuri, Abhijit Gupta, Sari Hanafi, Shamil Jeppie, Akoss Ofori-Mensah, Mark Muehlhaeusler, Padmini Ray Murray and Nureldin M. Satti.  

Shamil Jeppie and Souleyman Bachir Diagne (eds), The meanings of Timbuktu (Cape Town; Senegal: HSRC Press in association with CODESRIA, 2008).
A collection of essays on the manuscript cultures of Timbuktu, Mali, and the surrounding region. In English

Will today’s ubiquitous digital technologies and open access provide us with a new environment, which will alleviate geographic inequalities in knowledge production and distribution? Will this lead to new opportunities for arts and humanities scholars to make their voices heard as we try to navigate new global complexities? Or is digital change just homogenising the world of academic publications and suppressing the diversity of academic voices?

Join us for a debate and to find out how academics, publishers and librarians in the global South perceive these issues.

This conference is organised by The British Library in collaboration with Professor Marilyn Deegan, Kings College London and Dr Caroline Davis, Oxford Brookes University.

This event is an outcome of the Academic Book of the Future research project, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council.

The conference is now open for registration and full details are available on the British Library website, along with a provisional conference programme. The conference fee is £30.00 (£15.00 student rate) for the two-day event, which includes registration, lunch and refreshments.

Maja Maricevic, Head of Higher Education, British Library

A recently acquired group of miniatures painted on ivory and laid down on paper supports with identifying inscriptions,  still mostly with their original glass, is of considerable interest. Such items were increasingly the stock products of the tourist trade in Delhi in the later nineteenth century, but the inscriptions of this particular group suggested that they must have been made before 1850 and in Lahore or Amritsar rather than Delhi, the usual production centre for such items. The portraits include various Maharajas of the Punjab from 1839-49 with other rulers. They were presumably bought and pasted down onto sheets of paper in order to be sent off to Britain for the enlightenment of friends or relations at home, so that they could put a face to the names that occupied so much of the British press in the 1840s with the doings of the Lahore court and the two Sikh Wars, which ended in the annexation of the Punjab in 1849. Several of the inscriptions are unfortunately in error.

    
Inscribed: Now Nihal Sing successor to Rangeet Sing [i.e. Kharak Singh]; Maharajah of Lahore Ranjeet Sing; Bahadoor Shaw present King of Delhi [i.e. Akbar II]  (British Library, Add.Or.5680-82) 

The miniatures are arranged in four groups. Maharaja Ranjit Singh of Lahore (r. 1799-1839) is given primacy of place in the first group with the Mughal Emperor Bahadur Shah Zafar (r. 1838-58) to his right and Ranjit Singh’s son Kharak Singh (r. 1839-40) to his left. The inscriber has wrongly identified the latter as Nau Nihal Singh (r. 1840), who was the son and successor of Maharaja Kharak Singh (see next). He was still only aged nineteen when he was killed on returning from his father’s obsequies by masonry falling from an arch, and the portrait is of his father Kharak Singh. For his portrait around 1840 showing him with just a chin beard, see Archer 1966, pl. 35. The inscribed ‘present King of Delhi’ (as the British called the Emperor) dates paintings and inscriptions to at least before 1858. The inscriber seems mistaken here also, since the portrait is surely of Bahadur Shah’s father Akbar II (r. 1806-37) (see Dalrymple and Sharma 2012, nos. 30, 32-36). 

Inscribed: Dhuleep Sing present Ruler of Lahore; Kurruck Sing successor to Now Nihal Sing of Lahore; Kurrum Sing Rajah of Putteala [i.e. Kharak Singh] (British Library, Add.Or.5683-85) 

The second group has again a central portrait, that of Maharaja Kharak Singh (r. 1839-40), son and successor of Ranjit Singh, who died, it was rumoured, of poison. He has a very distinctive long pointed black beard. The inscriber has muddled Kharak Singh and his son Nau Nihal Singh. The latter was succeeded by Maharaja Sher Singh (r. 1840-43), another son of Ranjit Singh, who is represented later in the portraits, see below. Kharak Singh’s successor was Maharaja Dalip Singh (r. 1843-49), the youngest son of Ranjit Singh, identified with an inscription ‘the present Ruler of Lahore’ which firmly dates the whole group to before 1849. The other portrait in this group purports to be Maharaja Karam Singh of Patiala (r. 1813-45), ruler of one of the Cis-Sutlej states outside Ranjit Singh’s empire and allied to British India, but this portrait does not resemble him (for his portrait, see Stronge 1999, no. 188 and Falk and Archer 1981, no. 553). Again the long pointed black beard suggests Kharak Singh as in Add.Or.5680 above.


Inscribed: Rajah of Nepaul; Sumroo Begum; Mirza Zanghir 3 son King of Delhi [i.e. Maharaja Sher Singh]; Dost Mahomet (British Library, Add.Or.5686-89) 

Four of the remaining ivories are meant to be of local notables. These are the Maharaja of Nepal, who would seem to be the teenage Maharaja Surendra Bir Bikram Shah (b. 1829, r. 1847-81). Next is the Begum Samru of Sardhana (d. 1836) who ruled her own jagir near Meerut east of Delhi, one of the most redoubtable characters of early 19^th century India. Next, a portrait labelled as Mirza Jahangir, the third and favourite son of the Emperor Akbar II, who died in confinement in Allahabad in 1821, cannot be him since this figure is wearing a Sikh type of turban. In fact he is almost certainly the missing Maharaja Sher Singh of Lahore (r. 1841-43), identified by comparison with other portraits by Sikh artists as well as his well-known portraits by both Emily Eden and the Austrian artist T.A. Schoefft (for his portraits by Indian artists, see Archer 1966, pls. 92, 104). Finally in this group is Dost Muhammad, the Amir of Afghanistan (r. 1825-39, and again 1845-63). Dost Muhammad repeatedly fought with the Sikhs in his first reign over the disputed border territory of Peshawar, but then allied himself with them in the second period of his reign before the final annexation. He is often depicted in other groupings of Sikh notables.

The various dates of rulers presented above suggest that the grouping of the portraits was done some time between 1847 and 1849. After the final annexation of the Punjab in 1849, artists in both Lahore and Amritsar produced many sets of portraits on ivory of Sikh rulers and notables in the period of their greatness. The British Library already has five such sets (Archer 1969, nos. 190-194), including one set from the 1850s that is almost certainly among the earliest known (Stronge 1999, no. 20), but this new set is definitely from the late 1840s. It must have been put together put together by a British officer probably in the British Residency in Lahore that was established by the Treaty of Bhairowal in 1846, and sent back home as suggested above for the enlightenment of his friends.

While the arrangement of the first two groups of three portraits is perhaps arbitrary, nonetheless the central large portrait flanked by two smaller ones closely resembles that of the jewels of bazubands, the jewelled armbands worn by the elite as can be seen in the larger portrait of Kharak Singh above (Add.Or.5684). Whereas portraits on ivory by Delhi artists were normally individual commissions, and even when in sets such as of the Mughal emperors were individually framed, the idea behind these groupings of Sikh notables seems to have been to have them mounted up in a frame, as are indeed all those in the British Library which are enclosed in 19^th century frames (see Stronge 1999, no. 20).

Inscribed: [Ko]otub Minar Church at Delhi [Bui]ldings… at Delhi (British Library Add.Or.5691-94) 

The set ends (apart from one unidentified ruler, Add.Or.5690) rather oddly perhaps with three pictures on ivory of monuments of Delhi, all of them mounted up on the same sort of paper and with inscriptions in the same handwriting. In the middle is what is meant to be the church at Delhi, the church of St. James, built by Col. James Skinner near the Kashmir Gate and consecrated in 1836. It does however look rather more like a Mughal tomb such as that of Salim Chishti at Fatehpur Sikri and clearly the artist did not have a very good model for his depiction, although the dome and the parapet are passable. The heavy eave and the Mughal jalis or screens should not be there, but the tomb of William Fraser of 1836 seems to be present in front of the church.

Pictures on ivory of monuments had a different purpose from portraits, since often at this period they were mounted as brooches. Indeed one of the earliest such examples is a picture of the gateway of the Taj Mahal mounted up in a gold brooch with an inscription saying that it was sent from India by Lady Sale in 1840 (private collection). Later such pictures were mounted up into ivory boxes or else, as small circles or ovals, into cufflinks or shirt studs. Apart from brooches, they could also, we now learn from this set, be turned into earrings, since it has two pictures of the Qutb Minar, the famous 12/13^th century tower in old Delhi, painted on shapes that are surely destined to be long drop earrings, when encased in gold. Below the tower are painted little round pictures of the Taj Mahal in Agra on one and what appears to be the tomb of Ghiyath al-Din Tughluq on the other. An additional small circular painting of the Quwwat al-Islam mosque and the Qutb Minar may indeed have been for one of the roundels covering the ear lobe from which such drop earrings normally hung in the Victorian era. The roundel is actually loose but is positioned in the above image as if this was indeed the case.

The earring paintings can be dated by the presence of the cupola in Mughal style added to the top of the Qutb Minar during a restoration in 1828 by Major Robert Smith of the Bengal Engineers, which was removed in 1848. Although artists in Lahore or Amritsar might not necessarily have known this, they liked to be up to date with their depictions, so this is yet another reason to date the set to the late 1840s.

Although there is no direct evidence that this group of miniatures in ivory was painted in the Punjab, their subjects of local interest to the Punjab and their somewhat unsophisticated technique would certainly suggest that this was so. Sikh artists do not seem to have attempted to paint on ivory any earlier. Such work when done by Delhi artists is more refined and polished, and this will be the subject of a second blog.

References:

Archer, M., Company Drawings in the India Office Library, HMSO, London, 1972
Archer, W.G., Painting of the Sikhs, HMSO, London, 1966
Dalrymple, W., and Sharma, Y., Princes and Painters in Mughal Delhi, 1707-1857, Asia Society, New York, 2012
Falk, T., and Archer, M., Indian Miniatures in the India Office Library, Sotheby Parke Bernet, London, 1981
Stronge, S., ed., The Arts of the Sikh Kingdoms, V & A, London, 1999

J.P. Losty, Curator of Visual Arts (Emeritus)

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In a previous post (When Good Literary Taste Was Part of a Bureaucrat’s Job Description) I introduced readers to the high-ranking courtier, poet and writer Ānand Rām Mukhliṣ (1697?-1751). Here I focus on his idiosyncratic dictionary, the Mirʾāt al-iṣt̤ilāḥ (ʻMirror of Expressionsʼ) completed in 1158/1745, which provides us with a delightful hodgepodge of cultural and social information about eighteenth-century India

Decorative shamsah followed by the opening page of Mirʾāt al-iṣt̤ilāḥ (British Library Or.1813, f. 11)

The biographical note on a certain Rājah Harīsingh from Sialkot, for example, which describes him as peerless in archery and entertaining (ʿilm-i majlis), is a little unusual in its detail but unremarkable for this book:

On dark nights he shot by torchlight at a target made from knot of horsehair. He had a servant named Gopī… [Gopī] would place a piece of candle on the tip of his finger, set a lentil on it, place a grain of rice on top, and stand facing the Rajah, and the Rajah bent his bow. First he knocked the rice then the lentil then the candle from his finger. Neither did the Rajah make a mistake nor did the unjust [sic] servant frown. Now I come to his knowledge of entertaining...
(Mukhliṣ 2013: 238, my translation).

Biography of Rājah Harīsingh from Sialkot inserted into an explanation of the phrase tīr-būtah ʻarchery rangeʼ (British Library Or.1813, f. 90r)

The account continues by explaining that the Rajah had not studied Persian but could make conversation so impressively in the language that Iranians praised him. He also recited poetry in Hindi and Persian. He was a musician himself, and kept qawwāls (Sufi singers) and dancing girls in his retinue. This was a man who clearly knew how to throw a good party.

Historians delight in such specific descriptions of particular people in history, but it is of course unusual to find them in a text that purports to be a dictionary. In this case, the account of the Rajah fits into an entry on tīr-būtah (meaning an archery range). An elegantly written copy of this remarkable dictionary—or perhaps it is better to see it as a miscellany cast in the form of a dictionary—is available at the British Library in manuscript (Or.1813) and has recently been printed in a critical edition (Mukhliṣ 2013). Besides providing us with details about life in eighteenth-century Delhi, even a cursory reading of the text demonstrates the richness of Persian scholarship and literary society in late Mughal India.

The historical importance of Persian in India has all but faded from modern cultural memory, but it was undeniably the key medium of expression among north Indian elites during the Mughal period. Though Persian is written in the same script as Arabic and therefore often pigeonholed as an Islamic language, Persian was a secular language in pre-modern India in the sense that all communities had access to it (though there was a class divide—it was mostly an elite language) and many Hindus like Mukhliṣ made their living by mastering it. The parallels between the Persian of pre-colonial times and the English of today as languages of personal advancement in South Asia are striking. (For more on this, see my new book Delhi: Pages from a Forgotten History (Dudney 2015), which addresses the history of Persian in India in far more detail than I can here.)

The composition of Mukhliṣ’s dictionary came at a time of great uncertainty for Delhi’s elite. Patronage for poets and indeed the whole political system was being renegotiated in the wake of Nādir Shāh’s conquest of Delhi in 1739. Nādir, ethnically a Turk, had conquered the whole of Iran and the region that became Afghanistan and turned next to India. It is undeniable that politics were by then quite different from how they were in the Empire’s glory days, but it is almost eerie to trace how literary culture not only carried on but arguably shone with greater brilliance in the aftermath of the worst bloodshed Mughal Delhi had ever seen.

Three-quarter length portrait of Nādir Shāh, Shah of Iran (r. 1736–1747), painted by an anonymous artist ca. 1740. Oil on canvas (British Library F44)

Mirʾāt al-iṣt̤ilāḥ has a particular interest in administrative terminology as well as in words and expressions having to do with painting, clothing, handicrafts, animals, flowers, hot beverages (particularly coffee), games, and so on. It is different from other Persian dictionaries in that it contains a great number of  ʻproto-anthropologicalʼ observations as well as long digressions describing, for example, particular people that Mukhliṣ knew such as the poet and scholar Sirājuddīn ʿAlī Khān Ārzū (briefly defining the term ārzū as ʻhope and desireʼ in as many words serves an excuse to launch into several hundred words of praise for his friend and teacher) or objects like the Peacock Throne. Additionally, it ends each letter’s section with a series of adages (amsāl), some of which have Urdu equivalents provided.


In this passage the expression dar jang ḥalvā bakhsh nimīkunand  [During war they don't hand out sweets] is rendered in Hindi (written in a special calligraphic script) as laṛāʾī meṁ koʾī laḍḍū nahīṁ baṭte —Indian laddus have been substituted for halwa (British Library Or.1813, f. 141r)

Despite these unusual features, Mirʾāt fits squarely into a remarkable tradition of Persian lexicography that began in Central Asia and continued in the Indian Subcontinent, with virtually no counterpart in Iran. In fact, there is a gap of nearly three centuries between Surūrī’s Majmaʿ al-furs (first ed. 1008/1599-1600, compiled in Isfahan) and the next major dictionary written in Iran, Riẓā Qulī Khān Hidāyat’s Farhang-i anjuman-ārā-yi nāṣirī (1288/1871, compiled in Tehran). (The fullest account of Persian lexicography in English remains Henry Blochmann’s 1868 article)

Like earlier dictionaries, Mirʾāt bridges different usages around the vast region where Persian was a language of high culture, a region that at its peak stretched from Anatolia (modern Turkey) in the west across Central and Southern Asia to the Chinese frontier in the east. Scholars debate the question of how different Indian Persian was from Iranian Persian—remarkably there has been little dispassionate analysis of this topic since the starting point is usually the misleading assumption that Indo-Persian, whatever it was, could not have been ʻauthenticʼ compared to Iranian usage. That is a discussion for another time but worth mentioning in the context of Mukhliṣ’s scholarship because he was so attuned to how different people used words and expressions.

There is an apocryphal story that Mukhliṣ chased after the Qizilbash soldiers of Nādir Shāh’s army to ask them about points of Persian usage. The logic is that they were native speakers, and he wanted to know how Persian was really spoken. One difficulty in this story is that these soldiers were not actually native speakers in our sense because in daily life they either spoke Turkish dialects (like Nādir Shāh himself) or local variants of Persian. The category of native speaker (usually translating the term ahl-i zabān) is a problem in this context because literary Persian was a learned language. Mirʾāt was part of this economy of teaching Persian. The entry in Encyclopaedia Iranica claims that Mukhliṣ’s dictionary was intended to “to improve the falling standard of Persian in India”—but its preface does not in fact say anything like that (and indeed though there is a reference to īrān-zamīn [the land of Iran] in the colophon, this was written in 1850, a full hundred years after Mukhliṣ, and therefore cannot be assumed to reflect his thinking). Even the editors of the 2013 critical edition claim that “It can be seen from a close reading of the text that after finishing the work, he got it authenticated from speakers of the language just arrived in India” (2013: 33, English introduction). While some of his material comes from such people, the implication is wrong: He was asking them not because he thought of them as ʻnative speakersʼ but because they knew administrative terminology current in the establishment of Nādir Shāh, who having just conquered Delhi had modified the administrative structure to suit his needs. To find positions under the new regime, Mukhliṣ and his colleagues needed to be savvy in the new terms and procedures. It was not that Indian elites were desperate for Iranian native speakers to sort out their degenerate Persian but rather that they sought insider knowledge about the new political dispensation.

Further reading
Anand Ram Mukhlis, Mirʾāt al-iṣt̤ilāḥ, edited by Chander Shekhar, Hamidreza Ghelichkani and Houman Yousefdahi. Delhi: National Mission for Manuscripts, 2013.
—,  Encyclopaedic Dictionary of Medieval India: Mirat-ul-Istilah, translated by Tasneem Ahmad. Delhi: Sundeep Prakashan, 1993.  A complete English translation of the text, this is a useful tool but too ambiguous and inaccurate to be used without consulting the Persian text.
Ahmad, B, “Ānand Rām Mokles: Chronicler, Lexicographer, and Poet of the Later Mughal Period”, Encyclopædia Iranica vol. 2.1, p. 1 (1985).
Blochmann, Henry, “Contributions to Persian Lexicography”, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Bengal 37 (1): 1-72 (1868).
Dudney, Arthur Dale,  A Desire for Meaning: Ḳhān-i Ārzū's Philology and the Place of India in the Eighteenth-Century Persianate World. Columbia University Academic Commons, 2013.
—, Delhi: Pages from a Forgotten History. New Delhi: Hay House India, 2015.

Arthur Dudney, University of Cambridge
[email protected]

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In 1974 the auction house Sotheby’s in London sold two albums of drawings by an otherwise unknown artist called Sita Ram. These albums were respectively entitled Views by Seeta Ram from Moorsheedabad to Patna. Vol. I and Views by Seeta Ram from Secundra to Agra. Vol. IX. Each album contained 23 large watercolours of topographical views of the scenery and monuments of the relevant part of India. Both were soon dispersed to collectors all over the world. Apart from the clear inference that the albums were part of a much larger set commissioned by a wealthy British traveller, there was no clue to their provenance, patronage or date.


The famous cannon known as the Great Gun at Agra. Watercolour by Sita Ram, 1814-15 (British Library, Add.Or.4311)

One painting from the dispersed vol. IX, 'the Great Gun of Agra', was acquired for the British Library in 1986 and I subsequently published it without knowing the real provenance (Losty 1989). Other drawings from these albums were acquired by many prominent collectors of Indian paintings, including Ed Binney III , S.C. Welch, Krishna Riboud and Paul Walter. Many have been published over the years in various exhibition catalogues.

These are large watercolours (averaging 40 by 60 cm) by an Indian artist trained in the contemporary Murshidabad school, but no doubt working in Calcutta round about 1810-15. Sita Ram has clearly absorbed considerable influence from the English watercolourists and engravers in aquatints such as William Hodges and Thomas and William Daniell, as well as somewhat later artists in India such as George Chinnery. Despite the influences, this artist is able to compose picturesque and beautiful compositions in his own right as in this case, concentrating rather like Chinnery on a minor antiquity and relegating the Taj Mahal to the distance along the River Jumna where it shimmers through the heat haze. Many of these paintings also promised to be of great interest in the discovery of India’s past before the advent of photography and the Archaeological Survey. In the case of the painting above, for instance, the area was totally destroyed by the blowing up of the cannon in 1833 and the later building of the railway bridge across the Jumna past the north wall of the Agra Fort.

Admirers of later Indian painting could only hope that the missing volumes would one day turn up. This duly happened in 1995, when the British Library was offered and was able to acquire the remaining albums by Sita Ram (numbered II-VIII and X). They formed part of the collection of albums of drawings formed in India by the Marquess of Hastings, the Governor-General of Bengal 1813-23. The ten albums by Sita Ram illustrate Lord and Lady Hastings’ journey from Calcutta to Delhi and back in 1814-15. There were in all 25 albums of drawings in the collection, by Indian, Chinese and British artists. They had been for the last 150 years in the collection of the Marquis of Bute in Scotland, and indeed hitherto unknown and unsuspected. Hastings then turned out to be Sita Ram’s patron and the artist’s paintings of the voyage could be firmly dated 1814-15. This journey had been long known of through the publication in 1858 of Lord Hastings’ journal, edited by his daughter the Marchioness of Bute, who as a child had accompanied her parents on this grand voyage (Hastings 1858) and who had inherited all her father’s papers and albums.

The 10 albums each with 23 drawings form a grand diorama of north India, as if Hastings had set out to surpass the 144 aquatints of the Daniells’ Oriental Scenery. It is 20 years since the Library acquired these albums and finally it has been possible to publish them in a fitting manner with the enthusiastic cooperation of Pramod Kapoor of Roli Books in Delhi (Losty 2015). An introduction deals with the patron Lord Hastings and Sita Ram as an artist, but the meat of the book is the publication of 160 of the drawings taken on the voyage and of an abbreviated version of Hastings’ journal, which sheds so much light on the paintings. The two obviously go hand in hand, though Hastings refers only occasionally to the ‘Bengal draftsman’ who accompanied them.

In order to inspect the British possessions in India and to meet Indian rulers and notables, and in his capacity as Commander-in-Chief to keep a closer eye on the current war with Nepal, Hastings made a journey upcountry from Calcutta to the Punjab and back. The party embarked on 28 June 1814 at Barrackpore in a flotilla of no less than 220 boats. Hastings was accompanied by his wife and small children, by his secretaries and A.D.C.s, and no doubt by their wives and children, by 150 sepoys of the Governor-General’s Bodyguard, and by a battalion from the Bengal Army. They all would have needed boats for their luggage and equipment, for their horses, for their food and stores and floating kitchens. They needed to set off in the adverse conditions at the height of the monsoon, as only then was the water debouching from the Ganges into the Hooghly high enough for the boats to pass over the bar at Suti.


The flotilla on the River Ganges. Watercolour by Sita Ram, 1814-15 (British Library, Add.Or.4711)     

The flotilla conveyed them up the river Hooghly and into the main stream of the Ganges, past Patna, Benares and Allahabad as far as Cawnpore. Hastings provides graphic descriptions of the difficulties encountered on the river of fighting the adverse winds and the current, of the incessant necessity for ‘tracking’, i.e. the boatmen landing and pulling the boats upriver, and of the tedium when they had to wait for changes in the wind to get round promontories.


Temples at Rajghat, Benares. Watercolour by Sita Ram, 1814-15 (British Library, Add.Or.4718)

Some of the paintings illustrating the river journey are among the most tranquil and beautiful creations in Indian painting.


Lord Hastings and Nawab Ghazi al-Din enter Lucknow in state. Watercolour by Sita Ram, 1814-15 (British Library, Add.Or.4749)

At Cawnpore they disembarked from their boats and travelled overland to Lucknow. One of the principals purposes of the journey was for Hastings to meet the new Nawab Vizier Ghazi al-Din Haidar. Hastings tells us later that no less than 10,000 people were in the party at this time. The principal members of the party travelled by elephant, camel, horseback, palanquin and all the other means of transport employed in early nineteenth century India, whereas everyone else simply had to march. They moved at the rate of about ten miles a day (it took five days to cover the 50 miles between Cawnpore and Lucknow!), starting off before daybreak and reaching their next encampment before it became too hot. By having two complete sets of tents the second set was always available for the principal travellers when they arrived at the next encampment for breakfast. There they rested during the hear of the day, met the local people both British and Indian, and Hastings also could get on with the day-to-day tasks of governing India.


The travellers marching past the mountains at Kashipur. Watercolour by Sita Ram, 1814-15. British Library (Add.Or.4775)

From Lucknow, the party then marched north-westwards parallel to the Himalayas, passing to the north of Delhi up to Haridwar where the Ganges debouches onto the plains.


The ghats at Haridwar. Watercolour by Sita Ram, 1814-15 (British Library, Add.Or.4783)

They then turned south into the Punjab and approached Delhi from the west through Haryana. In the event, questions of protocol prevented Hastings from meeting the Mughal emperor Akbar II, or King of Delhi as the British referred to him at this time, although Lady Hastings went to Delhi as a sightseer, taking Sita Ram with her.


Lady Hastings visiting the Kalan Masjid in Delhi. Watercolour by Sita Ram, 1815 (British Library, Add.Or.4817)

Lord Hastings busied himself inspecting the garrison at Meerut before meeting up with his wife’s party again south of Delhi. The travellers turned south towards Agra, admiring the great Mughal monuments there and at Sikandra and Fatehpur Sikri, then marched to the British military station of Fatehgarh near Farrukhabad on the Ganges. There they passed the hot weather of 1815 waiting for the monsoon rains to swell the river so that they could pass over the bar at Suti and down the Hooghly to Calcutta. Sita Ram must have passed these months finishing off his watercolours and preparing them for pasting into the albums. The Hastings’ children became ill at this time and when the rains had swelled the river but the monsoon gales had abated, they embarked on their boats and sailed rapidly downstream to Calcutta where they arrived on 9 October 1815. The whole journey took seventeen months. Lady Hastings took the children home to England but later returned to be with her husband.


The Firoz Shah Minar at Gaur and a Palash tree. Watercolour by Sita Ram, 1817 (British Library, Add.Or.4888)

Sita Ram continued to work for Hastings.   Another two albums of drawings also by Sita Ram contain views in Bengal taken on subsequent tours, one during a sporting expedition to northern Bengal in 1817, and the other during a convalescent tour in the Rajmahal Hills in 1820-21. Sita Ram has matured even more as an artist by then and they contain some of his most beautiful works. With Hastings’ departure from India in 1823, however, Sita Ram disappears from the record and no further work is known from his hand.

Further reading:

Hastings, 1st Marquess of, The Private Journal of the Marquess of Hastings, K.G., ed. by the Marchioness of Bute, London, 1858
Losty, J.P., ‘The Great Gun at Agra’, British Library Journal, v.15, 1989, pp. 35-58
Losty, J.P., Sita Ram: Picturesque Views of India – Lord Hastings’s Journey from Calcutta to the Punjab, 1814-15, Roli Books, New Delhi, 2015 (also Sita Ram’s Painted Views of India, Thames & Hudson, London, 2015)

J.P. Losty, Curator of Visual Arts (Emeritus)

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Ānand Rām Mukhliṣ (1697?-1751) was a high-ranking courtier in Mughal Delhi in the first half of the eighteenth century. He came from a Punjabi Hindu family and followed his father into government service as had so many in the Khattri community, a sub-caste traditionally associated with record-keeping. He was wakīl (personal representative at court) for an imperial prime minister and for a governor of key provinces (see Ahmad), and had received the title ʻRajah of Rajahsʼ (rāʾī-yi rāyān) in recognition of his service. Befitting his stellar career as an administrator, he kept a wide social circle and was associated with the most important Persian poets in Delhi.

Portrait of the Mughal Emperor Muḥammad Shāh and the author's patron, the minister Iʻtimād al-Dawlah Qamar al-Dīn Khān. From Mukhliṣʼs presentation copy of his Kārnāmah-i ‘ishq ʻBook of Affairs of Loveʼ. Artist: Govardhan II, c.1735 (British Library Johnson Album 38, f. 7v)

Despite the increasing political difficulties of the Mughal crown over the course of the eighteenth century and the hardships endured by Delhi’s inhabitants during successive invasions and waves of unrest, the Indo-Persian literary culture in which Mukhliṣ participated was thriving. There were lavish poetic gatherings (mushāʿirahs) and a person’s literary comportment, namely his mastery of both poetry and prose, was still considered indispensable for political life. Meanwhile scholars were churning out dictionaries and critical tracts, and stretching the limits of Persian literature’s critical tradition, in some cases coming to strikingly modern conclusions about the nature of language and literary aesthetics.

The writing of history is obviously constrained by the sources available and in researching Indian history it is often difficult to find the right material to be able to zero in on particular individuals and their thought. Most Persian texts written in India remain unpublished and are only accessible in manuscript. The British Library’s manuscript holdings are probably unparalleled in the world for being able to provide information about Mukhliṣ and his contemporaries. Most excitingly, the Delhi Persian collection is full of mid-eighteenth-century Indo-Persian critical and educational texts. (Though the collection has always been available for consultation, it is only with the digitisation a few months ago of the notes for a never-published catalogue that many scholars knew of its holdings.)

Mukhliṣ was a prolific and varied writer. He was both a practicing poet and a professional bureaucrat, which at this time required mastery over a range of elegant prose composition styles including letter-writing. He was also a memoirist and wrote about his travels (see Alam and Subrahmanyam 1996).

Beginning of Aḥvāl-i sīzdah rūzah-i safar-i Garh Muktīsar, a diary, copied by the author, Ānand Rām Mukhliṣ, of his journey to the annual fair at Garmukhteshwar in 1747 and back (British Library IO Islamic 1612, ff.1v-2r)

As a scholar of literature, calligraphy, and painting he wrote works such as the dictionary Mirʾāt al-iṣt̤ilāḥ (which will be the subject of a later post). At least one of his works, the Kārnāmah-yi ʿIshq ʻBook of Affairs of Loveʼ was lavishly illustrated, as explored in a previous blog post by Malini Roy. In writing about his life, scholars have unfortunately not been as prolific as Mukhliṣ himself was. The only monograph on Mukhliṣ—in any language as far as I know—is the published version of a Delhi University PhD thesis from decades ago (James 2011).

Prince Gauhar and Khiradmand rescued by the simurgh
By Govardhan II, 1734-9
British Library, Johnson Album 38, f.51r - See more at: http://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/asian-and-african/2013/07/book-of-affairs-of-love.html#sthash.wC2C6RFu.dpuf

From Kārnāmah-i ‘ishq, the love-story of Prince Gauhar and Princess Malikah-i Zamani composed in 1731. In this scene Prince Gauhar removes the coverlet from the sleeping princess as proof of his presence in her tent. Artist: Govardhan II, c.1735 (British Library Johnson Album 38, f. 81v)

Mukhliṣ’s house was a meeting place for the great writers of the day. He received his established literary friends as well as poets whom he supported as they tried to make a name for themselves in Delhi. One of his close friends, Ṭek Chand Bahār, not only had a similar career path in the Mughal bureaucracy but like Mukhliṣ wrote a dictionary, the mammoth Bahār-i ʿajam (see a previous post by Muhammad Isa Waley). Both Mukhliṣ and Bahār were friends and students of Sirāj al-Dīn ʿAlī Khān, known as Ārzū, a poet who might be the greatest philologist (that is, what we would call a literary critic and linguist) in the pre-modern Persian tradition (see Dudney 2013). Although Mukhliṣ considered Ārzū one of his teachers and Ārzū was about a decade older than Mukhliṣ, it was Mukhliṣ who facilitated Ārzū’s entrée into Delhi’s elite cultural scene when Ārzū first settled in the city.

The final page and colophon of Mukhliṣʼs Parī khānah ʻFairy Houseʼ, a florid essay on the composition of ornate prose, composed in AH 1144 (1731/32). Copied by Jiyā Rām and dated 2 Rabīʻ I 1259 (2 April 1843) (British Library Delhi Persian 491, f. 11v)

Extract from Mukhliṣ's dictionary, Mirʾāt al-iṣṭilāḥ, relating to the Peacock Throne (British Library Delhi Persian 491, f.72r)

Every poet had a network of loyalties to his teachers, students, and contemporaries. Mukhliṣ appears to have been associated with a wide network of Hindu Persian writers, as a rare miscellany in the British Library (Delhi Persian 491—for details, see below) suggests by presenting his works alongside those of contemporary Hindu writers. (On Hindu Persian poets in Delhi, see Pellò 2014) Contrary to the received wisdom that a failing political order produces a failed literary tradition, I see the eighteenth century as a time of great innovation in Indo-Persian poetry. Poets were debating the role of tradition as never before and literary criticism was incredibly vibrant. Urdu’s development as a literary language was part of this innovation.

At this time, the literary tradition that would come to be known as Urdu was part of Indian Persianate culture, not an alternative to it. Mukhliṣ lived in the time when the Persian-using and Urdu-using community of Delhi were one and the same—this fact tends to get lost in later accounts that want to emphasise the break between Persian and Urdu—and while he has no surviving Urdu compositions to his name, there is no sense that he is holding himself apart from Indian culture by being an expert in Persian.

Mukhliṣ is relevant in our time because he confounds expectations about India’s past. Some today seek to define Indian culture as static, monolithic, and synonymous with the modern understanding of Hinduism. However, the existence of historical figures like Mukhliṣ is at odds with the worldview of such revisionists. He was perfectly at ease with Persian, even using Islamic devotional formulae in his writing, while being in the eyes of those around him and in his own mind unproblematically a devout Hindu, whatever that meant at the time.

British Library manuscript copies of works by Mukhliṣ
(Follow the hyperlinks for catalogue details)

• Muraqqaʻ, an album containing autograph letters, documents and poems collected by Mukhliṣ. Or 9236
• Various short selections from works by Mukhliṣ and his contemporaries. Delhi Persian 491
• Two texts by Mukhliṣ, (1) Aḥvāl-i sīzdah rūzah-i safar-i Garh Muktīsar, a description of a trip to a fair in Garmukhteshwar (in present-day Uttar Pradesh), and (2) a selection apparently from his autobiographical work Badāʾiʿ-i vaqāʾiʿ describing events in 1746-48. IO Islamic 1612 (Ethé 2724)
• Dastūr al-ʿamal, a manual on bureaucratic notations, including siyāq numbers. IO Islamic 2932 (Ethé 2125) and Add.6641 (Rieu p. 804) 
• Dīvān-i Mukhliṣ, the collected poems of Mukhliṣ. IO Islamic 2093 (Ethé 1707, dated 1744)
• Intikhāb-i Tuḥfah-i Sāmī, a selection made by Mukhliṣ of the 16th-century Safavid prince Sām Mīrzā’s taz̤kirah. Although the taz̤kirah itself is widely available, this abridgement is apparently only extant in this copy. The copyist was Kripā Rām, and it is likely that this was Mukhliṣ’s son of the same name. Delhi Persian 718
• Kārnāmah-i ʿishq, a lavishly illustrated poetical romance. Johnson Album 38 (previously discussed by Malini Roy here)
• Mirʾāt al-Iṣṭilāḥ,  a dictionary. Or.1813 (Rieu p. 997)
• Poems by Mukhliṣ appear in various compendia, e.g. IO Islamic 2674, (Ethé 2909, but there incorrectly cited as 2764) and in various taz̤kirahs
  
  

Further reading

Ahmad, B, “Ānand Rām Mokles: Chronicler, Lexicographer, and Poet of the Later Mughal Period”, Encyclopædia Iranica vol. 2.1, p. 1 (1985).
Alam, Muzaffar and Sanjay Subrahmanyam, “Discovering the Familiar: Notes on the Travel-Account of Anand Ram Mukhlis, 1745,” South Asia Research 16 (October 1996), pp. 131-154.
James, George McLeod, Anand Ram 'Mukhlis': His Life and Works 1695-1758. Delhi: Dilli Kitab Ghar, 2011.
Dudney, Arthur Dale, A Desire for Meaning: Ḳhān-i Ārzū's Philology and the Place of India in the Eighteenth-Century Persianate World. Columbia University Academic Commons, 2013.
Pellò, Stefano, “Persian as a Passe-Partout: The Case of Mīrzā ʿAbd al-Qādir Bīdil and his Hindu Disciples.” In Culture and Circulation: Literature in Motion in Early Modern India, edited by Allison Busch and Thomas de Bruijn. Leiden: Brill, 2014.

Arthur Dudney, University of Cambridge
[email protected]

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In a previous post, I looked at an important drawing of the Virgin of the Apocalypse that had been catalogued as Deccani c. 1640-60 by Falk and Archer (1981, no. 443) and argued that it was in fact Mughal from around 1600.  There are another nine drawings of Christian subjects from the Richard Johnson Collection described as mid-17^th century Deccani in the Falk and Archer catalogue (pp. 238-39), but on further examination it seemed harder and harder to justify describing some of them as Deccani rather than Mughal.  This is a difficult area for absolute certainty of attribution, given that we are dealing in most cases with later versions of earlier drawings.   Johnson’s postings are of no help: he was in Lucknow 1780-82 and in Hyderabad 1784-85, but Deccani paintings were freely available in Lucknow as well.  This blog will look at some more of these drawings, trying to disentangle the genuine Deccani from those that are in fact Mughal.

One of Johnson’s specific interests was in Mughal or Deccani paintings and drawings of Christian subjects, which were normally based on European engravings.  These were brought to Mughal India by the Jesuits in particular, who aimed to use such images to help in the conversion of the peoples of Asia.  Akbar’s and Jahangir’s artists painted over and copied such prints as aids in their quest for command of recession and volume and enlarged upon them in various ways without a care for the original iconography.  Although there do not seem to have been any missions sent from Goa to the relatively near Ahmadnagar or Bijapur courts, Christian prints undoubtedly found their way into the hands of these Deccani artists, as evidenced by two drawings in the Freer Gallery (Zebrowski 1983, nos. 83 and 146).  They are clearly different from Mughal treatments of Christian subjects, having a certain angularity and awkwardness about them offset by their calligraphic line or sumptuous colour, which seems typical of what to expect from such material.

Virgin and Child.  Mughal, 1620-30.  Wash drawing with added colour.  136 x 70 mm.  British Library, J. 6, 3. 

A drawing of a full-length statuesque Virgin carrying the Christ Child is catalogued by Falk and Archer as Deccani 1640-60, but the artist’s interest in naturalistic modelling of the drapery would seem to rule this out. The image is based ultimately on an engraving of the icon in the basilica of Santa Maria del Popolo in Rome, such as one by Giovanni Battista de’ Cavalieri.   

Madonna del Popolo.  Engraving by Giovanni Battista de’ Cavalieri, 1560-1600.  British Museum, Ii,5.104.  © Trustees of the British Museum 

Since the icon like the engraving is only half length the artist has extended it down, perhaps basing his modelling of the draperies on a different image.  The Christ Child’s hand is raised more to touch his Mother’s face than in the print or the actual icon, where it is raised in benediction, but Mughal artists were not slavish copiers and were perfectly capable of adding extra pathos to the icon. The engraver’s modelling through the use of cross-hatching is replaced as usual in our version by a skillful use of wash.  The blue background and the green grass below were added to our drawing later in Lucknow where such additions to drawings or unfinished paintings were commonplace in order to cater to European collectors’ taste.

The Madonna del Popolo differs from the even more venerated icon called the Salus Populi Romani in the basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore in that instead of the latter’s hieratic full face image, she had turned her face down towards the Child.  Several Mughal versions of the Salus Populi Romani as engraved by Wierix are known, including one in the St. Petersburg Album attributed to Manohar.   There seem to have been fewer versions made of our image, although another early 17^th century full length Mughal version also with the Virgin interacting with her son as in our drawing appeared at Sotheby’s 26 April 1995, lot 128 (verso), but with the Christ Child’s hand not raised so far up. 

Angels bowing down before a saint.  Mughal, 1630-40.  Wash drawing with added colour.  119 x 99 mm.  British Library, J.6, 4. 

A closely related image with simple wash modelling, again thought by Falk and Archer to be Deccani 1640-60, seems at first sight to be another image of Christian piety, but its origins are more complex.  Two angels are bowing down before a nimbate female figure carrying a book.  The kneeling angel has feathered limbs, the other hovers above the ground with bent legs.  This drawing does not seem to be based directly on an engraving, but rather on an allegorical drawing by the great Mughal artist Basawan from the 1580s.  In that drawing a winged angel bows down before a robed female figure carrying an ektara, a one-stringed musical instrument,and a bow (David and Soustiel 1986, pl. 1).  While one of his allegorical figures now in the Musée Guimet in Paris is based on the frontispiece to the Royal Polyglot Bible printed in Antwerp 1568-72, which was presented to Akbar in 1580 by the first Jesuit mission, Basawan freely adapted it, and also seems to have invented similar types of figures such as the originals of our figures and the next for which no European source has yet been found.  At some stage Basawan’s allegory was converted in the Mughal studio into a more conventional Christian subject.  The female figure has been given a halo and a book, and with her loose hair and in the absence of a veil, is presumably intended to be a saint such as St Catherine of Alexandria, one of whose symbols is a book.  As in the case of Madonna del Popolo above, background and landscape have been added in Lucknow.

An allegorical figure, perhaps intended for the penitent Magdalen.  Wash with colour.  Deccani , 1640-60.  135 by 93 mm.  British Library, J.14, 6. 

Another drawing, although closely based on an earlier Mughal allegorical study, appears this time actually to be Deccani. A robed female figure stands fervently praying upwards to the heavens in a landscape, with an altar on which are vessels and a book in front of her and a tall ewer behind her.  A sloping hillside with protruding trees closes the scene.  A very similar earlier Mughal version of this composition appeared at Sotheby’s London 2 November 1988, lot 109, with a similar but more developed landscape, attributed to Basawan 1585-90.  That figure’s hair was tied up in a chignon and a jewelled fillet with an aigrette placed round her hair as was usual with Basawan’s allegorical figures.  In our version our artist has loosened her hair so that it tumbles round her shoulders and placed a red cap sporting an aigrette jauntily on the back of her head.  Her visible ear is absolutely covered with jewelled ornaments.  The wash modelling of the draperies is somewhat perfunctory.  A certain awkwardness in the rendition of her face, the exaggeration of her curly locks streaming down her back and the over-the-top ear adornments suggests that this may indeed very well be Deccani from the mid-century.

The Last Supper.  Mughal, 1640-60.  Wash drawing with colour.  167 by 97 mm. British Library, J.6, 6 

Another slightly damaged drawing is based on a combination of prints including one of the Last Supper.  Jesus has just handed the piece of bread dipped in the dish in front of him to Judas who is standing on the right, thereby identifying Judas as he who would betray him.  The drawing shows some interesting variations, including a combination of sitting and standing disciples, from whatever European sources lie behind it. The disciples, rather less than twelve, are clothed in a mixture of Biblical and contemporary Portuguese costume.  The youthful long-haired John, often depicted leaning on Christ’s chest or shoulder in this scene, has been interpreted as a woman who is now seated on Christ’s right.  The scene is set in a courtyard surrounded by Renaissance arches capped by Mughal chajjas. Two women are at the edges of the composition, one kneeling with a document, the other raising a curtain.The disciples lean forward keen to understand the significance of what is going on.  Another almost identical, contemporary drawing was in one of Warren Hastings’s albums from the collection of Sir Thomas Phillipps (Sotheby’s 27 November 1974, lot 812), there called Mughal mid-17^th century, and again there seems little reason to dispute this attribution for our drawing.  No print of the Last Supper seems to include dogs, but Mughal artists often add them to any scenes with Europeans regardless of their source.

 In the Johnson collection there are two almost identical drawings showing the Christ Child lying on the ground being adored by a kneeling Virgin Mary in a moonlit landscape.  Two angels stand in adoration to the side while others hurtle down through billowing clouds from the sky above bearing musical instruments, a book and symbols.  The scene is set in the open outside a hut under a rocky outcrop, while Indian hump-backed cattle and sheep inhabit the foreground, the former standing in a stream. No European engraving appears to be directly behind this drawing, although other versions are known, suggesting that the iconography was put together in India.

The Virgin worshipping the Christ Child with angels.  Deccani , 1640-60.  Wash drawing with gold.  182 by 128 mm.  British Library, J.6, 2.fc 

The two standing angels wear short tunics as in J.6, 4 above and have feathered limbs in addition to their wings, while the flying ones have long robes.  In the second version (J.6, 1) one of the standing angels wears a leaf skirt, as if he were a Bhil.  The flying angels’ hurtling progress is found again in a somewhat later Deccani page in the Metropolitan Museum, New York, from Nusrati’s Dakhni Urdu romance Gulshan-i ‘Ishq, in which fairies descend by night to take the sleeping prince Manohar to his beloved (Haidar and Sardar 2015, no. 173).  As with the penitent Magdalen discussed above, a Mughal version lies behind this composition, such as one in the Binney collection in the San Diego Museum (Binney 1973, no. 65).  This seems to be from the early Jahangiri period, judging by the old fashioned piled up rocks in the landscape, which are echoed in the later versions.  It lacks the two adoring angels with feathered limbs, while the angels hover statically in the sky with only their heads and wings visible. Another much closer version of this subject with similarly plummeting angels is in the Chester Beatty Library, Dublin, this time with the standing angels of our versions, who both have leaf skirts as well as feathered limbs (Arnold and Wilkinson 1936, pl. 82).   Both our drawings and the Dublin version obviously are following the Mughal model but augmenting it, certainly with the angels and also with what appear to be large numbers of birds in the sky (or possibly bats since it is night).  What marks these drawings out as Deccani is the highly stylized tree on the right, far removed from the naturalistic tree of the Binney version, so that the original attribution sees correct.

Further Reading:

Bailey, G.A., Counter Reformation Symbolism and Allegory in Mughal Painting, Ph. D. thesis, Harvard University, 1996

Binney, E., 3^rd, Indian Miniature Painting from the Collection of Edwin Binney, 3^rd:  the Mughal and Deccani  Schools, Portland, 1973

David, M.-C., and Soustiel, J., Miniatures orientales de l’Inde 4, Paris, 1986

Falk, T., and Archer, M., Indian Miniatures in the India Office Library, London, 1981, pp. 238-39

Haidar, N. and Sardar, M.,  Sultans of Deccan India 1500-1700: Opulence and Fantasy, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 2015

Zebrowski, M., Deccani Painting, Sotheby Publications, University of California Press, London and Los Angeles, 1983

J.P. Losty, Curator of Visual Arts (Emeritus)