AT the peak of their power in the mid-17th century, the great
Mughals were the richest and most powerful Islamic dynasty. They ruled
over 100 million subjects five times the number commanded by their only
rivals, the Ottomans. From the ramparts of the Delhi Red Fort, the seat
of power, Shah Jahan the emperor who commissioned the Taj Mahal
controlled almost all of India, the whole of what is now Pakistan and
Bangladesh, as well as much of Afghanistan. The Mughals held the latter,
then known as Khorasan, more successfully than any other invader,
before or since.
For their impoverished contemporaries in the distant west,
floundering in their codpieces and doublets, the Mughals became symbols
of power, sophistication, luxury and might in Paradise Lost, for
example, the cities of Mughal India are revealed to Adam after the fall
as future wonders of God’s creation. These are attributes with which the
word “mogul” is still loaded 400 years later: when someone writes today
of a Hollywood or real estate mogul, they are unwittingly recalling the
impression the Mughals made on our befuddled Elizabethan ancestors.
Sooner or later, all empires fall, and by the beginning of the 18th
century, just as the British were beginning to make their presence felt
on the coasts and seaports of India, the political power of the Mughals
had begun to fall apart in the most spectacular fashion. As the
provinces broke off one by one, the imperial capital of Delhi descended
into violent chaos. Three emperors were murdered, while one of them,
Farrukhsiyar, was imprisoned and starved, then later blinded with a hot
needle and strangled; the mother of another ruler was throttled while
the father of a third was forced off a precipice on his elephant.
It has long been believed that the art and architecture of the
Mughals followed a similar trajectory to their political fortunes: that
from the triumphs of the period of Shah Jahan, notably the great
Padshahnama (subject of a spectacular exhibition at the Queen’s Gallery
in London, in 1997), Mughal art rapidly declined. Shah Jahan’s
puritanical son, the emperor Aurangzeb, is often said to have disbanded
the imperial painting atelier, and later emperors were assumed to have
failed to muster either the resources, or the energy, to restore it.
Successive sackings of Delhi by Persian and Afghan invaders, the coming
of the colonial British, followed finally by the arrival of photography,
have traditionally been seen to have dealt the final death blows to the
Mughal miniature tradition.
Today few specialists would hold with such a bald version of events,
but it certainly remains true that the art of the later Mughals remains
under-studied and under-appreciated. This is one reason why, over the
past five years, the art historian Yuthika Sharma and I have been
sourcing and putting together the first ever exhibition of late Mughal
art, aiming to showcase the neglected masterpieces of this fascinating
transitional period and to provide a taste of the strength, colour, and
vivacity of the work produced in the Mughal capital at this time. The
result, Princes and Painters in Mughal Delhi 1707-1857, opened recently
at the Asia Society in New York.
The show is part of a much wider reassessment of the later Mughal
period that has been going on for some time. It is now recognised that
despite its political decline, Delhi remained a major artistic and
cultural centre for 150 years after its military and economic power had
ebbed, and despite diminished resources, the later emperors continued to
patronise remarkable artists and poets with Medici-like discrimination.
One of the first exhibits shows the longest surviving sovereign of
the age, the Emperor Muhammad Shah II, 1719-48 (called Rangila, the
Merrymaker), playing during Holi, the Bacchanalian Hindu spring festival
of colours. The painting, by Bhupali Singh, dates from about 1737, less
than three decades after the death of Aurangzeb, yet already we have
moved as far as can be imagined from the joyless world of the puritan
Mughal. A Muslim emperor joins in a Hindu festival, throwing colour
bombs at his favourite courtesan, Gulab Bai, as female musicians play
tablas and sarangis and the court dissolves into a riot of bright
yellows, purples, oranges and inferno reds.
Muhammad Shah, depicted by Bhupali Singh as an eye-shadow-wearing
dandy, was the longest surviving sovereign of the age. He seems to have
survived by the simple ruse of giving up any pretence of ruling: in the
morning he watched partridge and elephant fights; in the evenings he was
entertained by jugglers, ventriloquists and mime artists; he was often
dressed in a lady’s peshwaz and pearl-embroidered shoes. But while
presiding over the decline of Mughal political power, Muhammad Shah also
proved to be a discerning patron, employing such master artists as
Nidha Mal (active 1735-75) and Chitarman (active 1715-1760), whose
masterworks show bucolic scenes of court life, Diwali firework parties
alive with sprinklers and rockets, hunting and hawking, etc.
Again and again the artists of the period return to the idyll of the
Mughal pleasure garden, a hint of escapism, perhaps in reaction to
violent reality. There is a direct parallel to the spirit of Restoration
London: after the chill of Cromwell’s Commonwealth in England, with the
theatres closed and festivities banned, society reacted to the enforced
puritanism by heading in the opposite direction. In Delhi this was, for
example, the age of the great poet-courtesans: Ad Begum would turn up
at parties without dress, but so cleverly painted that no one would
notice: “She decorates her legs with beautiful drawings in the style of
pyjamas instead of actually wearing them.”
In addition to re-establishing the imperial painting atelier,
Muhammad Shah presided over a cultural and intellectual renaissance, as
Delhi’s scholars, mystics, musicians, poets and painters increased in
fame as fast as its military fortunes diminished, and the city was
enlivened by a culture of coffee houses and literary salons.
A report released by US cell phone companies shows a disturbing spike
in the number of requests by US law enforcement agencies for cell phone
information. Even more disturbing, most law enforcement agencies do not
provide a proper warrant.
