Appropriation and Subversion of the Mughal Idiom in Rajput Paintings of the Eighteenth Century

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KAVITA SINGH A Knowing Look: Appropriation and Subversion of the Mughal Idiom in Rajput Paintings of the Eighteenth Century

In seventeenth- and eighteenth-century India, a number of painters left imperial Mughal service to become leading artists at Rajput courts. They carried with them the Mughal style: techniques, skills, visual devices and vocabularies that had been honed over the past century to produce grandiloquent images of the Mughal emperor and courtly life. This paper briefl y explores the ways in which the Mughal style was re-signifi ed as it was re-inscribed in its new homes: as repetition, citation, appropriation, and subversion. In the discourses of Indian art history, paintings made for the Mughal (Islamic) and Rajput (Hindu) courts between the sixteenth and ninteenth centuries are spo- ken of as being utterly distinct from each other. These two traditions have been positioned as binary opposites from the fi rst major study that announced the exis- tence of Rajput painting to the world. In the introduction to his magisterial two- volume Rajput Painting (1916),1 the great nationalist ideologue and art historian Ananda Coomaraswamy said:

Mughal art is secular, intent upon the present moment, and profoundly interested in individuality […] It is splendid and attractive but it rarely touches the deep springs of life […] Rajput painting [being] essentially mystic […] emerges as the culture of the whole race, equally shared by kings and peasants.2

Coomaraswamy was contrasting Mughal painting, which absorbed Renaissance naturalism in the sixteenth century, with Rajput painting, whose many schools were marked by less naturalistic, more stylized modes. For the Mughals, the acqui- sition of naturalism made painting a worthy medium to capture contemporary life through meticulously detailed renderings of portraits and historic events. Accor- ding to Coomaraswamy’s formulation, Rajput painting deliberately eschewed naturalism as it was more concerned with religious and spiritual themes, speaking to eternity rather than the here and now. The binary established by Coomaraswamy continues to inform scholarly and popular accounts of the ﬁ eld even today. But such formulaic readings, which see ›Rajput‹ as antithetical to ›Mughal‹, are hardly tenable in the light of our under- standing of the political history of the times. In real terms, Mughal and Rajput

1 Ananda Coomaraswamy, Rajput Painting: Being an Account of the Hindu Paintings of Ra- jasthan and the Panjab Himalayas from the Sixteenth to the Nineteenth Century Described in their Relation to Contemporary Thought, London 1916. 2 Ibid., p. 20.

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regimes were deeply entangled with each other. Through the centuries of the Mu- ghal imperium, most Rajput dynasties that retained power did so by accepting Mughal overlordship. Rajput kings were absorbed into imperial service as admin- istrators and warriors; Rajput princes were expected to remain in attendance at the Mughal court. Moreover, the third Mughal emperor, Akbar (r. 1556-1605), initi- ated a phase of strategic marital alliances, in which Mughal emperors took Rajput brides; over the next few generations, Mughal princes and emperors were them- selves the sons of Rajput queens. Rajput rulers were thus inducted into the Mu- ghal administration, the nobility and the imperial family at all levels. As a result, many Rajput rulers absorbed Mughal courtly culture and emulated the Mughal style in their language, dress and etiquette as much as in the architecture or arts they patronized. The infl uence was mutual, with Rajput cultural elements – in music, literature, philosophy, architecture or warfare – similarly being absorbed into the Mughal court. Contrary to Coomaraswamy’s formulation, far from being distinct from Mughal painting, Rajput painting itself seems to spring from Mughal roots. The very phe- nomenon of painting as a courtly art – producing high-quality, fi nely fi nished art- works for secular and connoisseurly purposes – seems to have been brought to In- dia by the Mughals.3 When Rajput courts established ateliers, they did so in response to the Mughal example; in many instances, the Rajput ateliers were ex- panded, or even founded, when a Mughal painter left imperial service and sought employment at a Rajput court. Curiously, however, even as Rajput rulers absorbed other elements of Mughal courtly culture early on in their relationship, the emula- tion of Mughal painting came after a hundred-year lag. Despite all the cultural ex- changes that transpired between Mughal and Rajput realms from the sixteenth century, Rajput patrons did not take up the project of painting, Mughal-style, through the reigns of Akbar, Jahangir or Shah Jahan: as Stephen Kossack observes, »The Hindu courts had already been under Mughal hegemony for over a century and during that time had shown little interest in the content of Mughal painting«.4 Then, a little after 1660, a few Rajput courts established painting ateliers of their own, which produced a number of paintings that closely resembled Mughal works. More extraordinary was a second wave of atelier-building that occurred in the second quarter of the eighteenth century: at this time, many Rajput courts obtained

3 The Islamic Sultanates preceding the Mughals are best known for their architecture, but im- portant manuscripts from this time are mainly illuminated Qurans; we know of only a few secular paintings from these courts. And while texts written in pre-Mughal Rajput courts de- scribe secular uses for paintings, the surviving paintings from non-Islamic patrons in pre- Mughal era are chiefly illustrations of Buddhist and Jain and a very few Hindu religious texts. It was the second Mughal emperor, Humayun (r. 1530-1540 and 1555-1556), who, besotted by Persian court culture, imported artists from the court of the Persian Shah Tahmasp and set them about illustrating poetic manuscripts, making portraits, and rendering feasts and for- mal audiences at court. In time the Mughal impulse to patronize this kind of secular and self- consciously fine painting would spread to other courts. 4 Steven Kossak, Indian Court Painting, 16th to 19th century, New York 1997, p. 16.

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