Download PDF | Mughal Art and Imperial Ideology: Collected Essays, by Ebba Koch (Author), Oxford University Press 2001.
346 Pages
Introduction
The idea of assembling a selection of my essays in a single volume arose from discussions with Sunil, Kumar, who has long complained about my predilection for publishing in—from an Indian point of view—‘esoteric, expensive places’, such as western art history journals and Austrian and German publishing houses. As an historian he impressed upon me the realization that, even though in recent times art historians have increasingly addressed broader cultural issues than in the past, art history is not yet sufficiently appreciated by political, social, and economic historians dealing with Mughal India.
This disciplinary schism has also been of concern to Sanjay Subrahmanyam who points out that,
Most writers on art-history and architectural history accept in a relatively unquestioning manner the basic postulates on the nature and history of the Mughal state set out for them by political and social historians, on the basis of chronicles and documents; political and social historians, for their part seem to have disdain for art-history and allied disciplines.’
I have in a number of essays sought new insights into the ideological and social relevance of imperial Mughal art by combining purely art-historical methods, such as the analysis of forms, with the information generated from literary sources. Collecting these papers together in a volume may help to bridge the gap between the two disciplines.
An integrative approach is particularly appropriate for Mughal studies because it seems to coincide with the Mughal state of mind. Mughal artists, guided by imperial patrons, increasingly used the visual arts to express themes that were not addressed or were only sketchily alluded to in writing. Court historians and poets were clearly more restricted than the artists in the selection of topics by the stylistic and thematic conventions of their genre, which they seem to have been incapable of or prohibited from breaking. That these literary conventions were, at times, entirely self-serving becomes apparent when we test them against the visual evidence. The standard formula of Shah Jahan’s historians and poets for praising a building was to extoll its ‘sky touching height’, even though the actual palace architecture of the period consisted typically of rather low and wide buildings.” Praising
'Sanjay Subrahmanyam, ‘The Mughal State-Structure or Process? Reflections on Recent Western Historiography’, The Indian Economic and Social History Review, 29/3 (July-September 1992), pp. 292-3. However, despite Subrahmanyam’s call for a work of synthesis, The Mughal State 1526-1750, eds. Sanjay Subrahmanyam and Muzaffar Alam (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998), concentrates on economic and administrative subjects.
2See, for instance, the audience hall or Diwan-‘Amm in the Red Fort of Agra of which ‘Abd al-Hamid Lahauri Badshah nama, Persian text eds. Kabir al-Din Ahmad and ‘Abd al-Rahim (Calcutta: Royal Asiatic Society of Bengal, 1866-72), pp. 235-6; trans. Nur Bakhsh, ‘The Agra Fort and Its Buildings’, Archaeological Survey of India, Annual Report, 1903 the height of a building was a time honoured eulogistic formula to be used even when it contradicted the actual appearance of the structure being praised. A building or a work of art will thus always be a more reliable source than a literary reference.
This observation also applies to the cause celebre generated by Wayne Begley’s interpretation of the Taj Mahal as the throne of God.’ The fact that the Taj—like several other buildings of Shah Jahan—was compared eulogistically to the throne of God (‘arsh), does not necessarily mean that the mausoleum was actually modelled on Islamic concepts of what the throne of God looked like. When we examine the building in this context—which I do in ‘The Mughal Waterfront Garden’—we realize that the throne-of-God metaphor has been overemphasized at the expense of other textual references which describe the mausoleum as an earthly replica of the abode of. Mumtaz in the gardens of heavenly paradise.‘ From the analysis of its forms, it is evident that the Taj Mahal was conceived precisely as that; its layout is entirely within the tradition of Mughal residential gardens. whose characteristic plan is here brought to the monumental scale of imperial funerary architecture. The decoration of the architecture with plants and flowers supports the paradise-garden metaphor, in addition to the inscriptional programme dedicated to eschatological themes.
‘Because of the independence of literary themes and their unreliable degree of relevance, which is particularly pronounced in eulogistic phraseology, each textual reference needs to be carefully evaluated and tested against the visual record before it can be used as historic evidence.
This requirement should not, however, deter us from turning to the genre of eulogy when we are in search of the meaning of a work of art. More often than not, it is the only literary evidence we have, because analytical writing about the intentions of art was not a genre of Mughal literature. Comments on art and architecture may be embedded in general historical works, but-——as I argue in the essay, ‘Diwan-i ‘Amm and Chihil Sutun’—the historians may not always be inclined to give us the full truth. In the case of Shah Jahan’s audience halls, they tell us unanimously that the emperor erected the halls out of a philanthropic motive, to protect his nobles from the sun and rain. However, the designation of the halls as chihil sutun (forty pillared) as well as the eulogistic references, but above all the architecture itself, suggest that the halls owed their construction to a much more ambitious motive: they were intended as a copy of the multicolumned halls of Persepolis, then known as Chihil Sutun; in this way Shah Jahan sought to associate himself with the pre-Islamic Persian concepts of kingship.
This dialectic relationship between the textual and visual expression can also be found in those instances when an author is not restricted by the thematic or stylistic requirements that fettered court historians and poets. A case in point is when the author is the emperor himself. Jahangir expressed himself very freely in his autobiography Jahangir nama (Tuzuk-i Jahangiri), the history he wrote of himself and his reign. However, when he writes about his concepts and practices of rulership, his tone becomes formal and self-congratulatory, in tune with the style of his panegyrists. For example, when he describes the revival of an ancient royal practice, the fastening of a chain of justice at a tower of the Agra Fort, he says:
After my accession, the first order I gave was for the fastening up of the Chain of Justice, so that if those engaged in the administration of justice should delay or practise hypocrisy in the matter of those seeking justice, the oppressed might come to this chain and shake it so that its noise might attract [the emperor’s] attention.
An illustration then shows how the institution of the chain of justice was actually handled: the petitioners are checked by. guards (Fig. 0.1).° Jahangir himself seems to have found no fault with this unflattering but realistic rendering of his own description, since he obviously approved of the painting as an illustration of the Jahangir nama. This seems to confirm that the written word was governed by different standards of realism than the visual image.
In some instances the literary sources fail us completely, and we have to rely on the art. Such is the case for Jahangir’s attitude towards Europe. In his Jahangir nama Jahangir has very little to say about Europe, and does not even mention Sir Thomas Roe, the envoy of King James I of England, although Roe spent all of two-and a half years (1615-18) at Jahangir’s court and provided us with vivid descriptions of his intimate meetings with the emperor.’ Jahangir’s interest in Europe is, however, expressed in pictorial terms. James I is included in an allegorical painting in which Jahangir prefers a Sufi shaikh to various rulers of the world;* wall paintings of European dignitaries and Christian figures formed a distinct decoration in Jahangiri palaces, and Jahangiri painting is generally characterized by a comprehensive adaption of European modes of artistic expression, a subject investigated here in the essays, ‘The Influence of the Jesuit Missions’, and ‘Jahangir and the Angels’.
Another topic about which texts have very little to say and where we have to rely mainly on art is art itself. Artistic theory, as already pointed out, was not a topic of interest to Mughal writers, to the point where one wonders how the Mughals remained so unaffected by the shastric texts of India. In contrast to the prominent position of art, there is very little writing on painting. The most detailed text comes from Akbar’s historian, Abu’l Fazl, but even he devotes only a few pages of his encyclopaedic work, the A’ in-i Akbari, to it. He comments in tantalizing brevity on the relevance of this art and its orientation towards European painting, and makes only a few remarks about the activities of the imperial painting studio.? When Abu’! Fazl weighs painting against writing and declares ‘pictures as much inferior to the written letter’, he is voicing a traditional prejudice of treatises on calligraphy and painting, where painting—because of its controversial status in Islamic thinking—is treated as a lesser art.'° Jahangir, too, despite his personal involvement in painting, has not very much to say about it in his Jahangir nama, where he comments in by far greater detail on his non-artistic interests, such as zoology, botany, and hunting.
In Shah Jahan’s reign, there are even fewer literary references to painting than in earlier times, and the involvement of the imperial patron is glossed over, undoubtedly to avoid tainting his self-propagated image as a mujaddid (a religious renewer). This does not mean that the emperor was not an active patron of painting. In ‘The Hierarchical Principles of Shahjahani Painting’, I attempt to show that from the circumstances in which pictures were created and from the paintings themselves it can be deduced that the emperor acted as his own artistic director who, together with the painters of the imperial studio, laid down strict rules for pictorial representation. These principles were used so consistently that they can be easily extracted by looking at the pictures themselves; painting thus takes on the task of serving as its own theoretical commentator.
While painting in Shah Jahan’s time had to explain itself entirely in its own terms, architecture became a major theme of the court chronicles and poetic works of the period. Their authors provide us with detailed descriptions of the imperial building projects, unparallelled in length, detail and exact terminology by earlier or later Mughal texts, with the exception perhaps of Khwandamir’s description of the buildings of Humayun. Shah Jahan’s authors are obviously following the dictates of their imperial patron who supported architecture as the most prestigious and useful art, untainted by orthodox reservations towards painting. These detailed comments on architecture make a study of Shahjahani buildings particularly rewarding but still, with the exception of a few isolated remarks, there is no theorizing about architecture. We are, however, not left without Mughal architectural theory, because like Shahjahani painting, Shahjahani architecture explains itself very clearly and systematically on its own terms. The Taj is ‘built architectural theory’ which can be read almost like a literary text, once we have mastered the grammar and the vocabulary of the architectural language.
The studies assembled in this book form a coherent group in that they all discuss how ideas of rulership were expressed in Mughal art. They have been left as they were originally written. I have, however, carried out small amendments and corrections, and also added bibliographical references, to bring the volume up to date. The essays reflect my own development as a Mughal art historian. Before | became interested in Mughal art in 1976, I had studied European art. In the beginning, therefore, I was particularly intrigued by the interest the Mughals had for European art and the way they explored, even exploited it for their own artistic purposes and ideological formulations. The first three essays trace the gradual introduction of Europeanizing forms of artistic expression into painting, wall painting, architecture, and the decorative arts in the process of creating a realistic iconography of Mughal kingship. The development culminated in the Gesamtkunstwerk of Shah Jahan’s throne in the audience hall at Delhi, which emerges from the discussion in ‘Shah Jahan and Orpheus’ as an artistic manifesto of Shah Jahan’s imperial ideology. ‘The Hierarchical Principles of Shah-Jahani Painting’ concludes this group with a ‘deconstruction’ of Shahjahani history painting which reveals that realistic Europeanizing forms were set against and integrated into abstract compositions in order to use painting as a specific form of imperial expression. Earlier ideas of the Jahdngir nama were here organized into a representational system, testifying to the visual concerns of the society in which it was created. ,
The chapters that follow investigate various architectural and urbanistic themes, tracing their evolution over time and space, and examining the manner in which they were variously treated under each of the ‘Great Mughals’—the first six rulers of the dynasty—with special emphasis on the architecture of Shah Jahan’s reign. ‘The Delhi of the Mughals’ deals with urbanistic assertion, as does ‘The Mughal Waterfront Garden’, which also considers the contextual and ideological use of a garden type, specifically developed for the geographical conditions of Hindustan. ‘Mughal Palace Gardens’ investigates the development and the meaning of the Mughal palace garden and continues the discussion of the new naturalistic plant decoration of Shahjahani architecture, first examined in ‘The Baluster Column’. Individual buildings are analysed in ‘Diwan-i ‘Amm and Chihil Sutun’, the study looks in particular at the establishment of a central ceremonial building type and at its programme. | have also included ‘The Lost Colonnade of Shah Jahan’s Bath in the Red Fort of Agra’, though the circumstances of its disappearance from India have to do, not with Mughal ideology, but with the ideological attitudes of the British Raj. Finally, ‘The Copies of the Qutb Minar’ traces the afterlife of the Qutb Minar in Indian architecture up to modern times, suggesting why its fullest reconstruction was undertaken for Shah Jahan.
From these investigations, the reign of Shah Jahan emerges as a time when the visual arts were most consistently and most systematically explored as a means of promulgating imperial ideology. The written texts and the arts were equally seen as necessary means to represent the ruler and his state for a wider public and of providing a lasting memorial to his fame. Strict formal principles served to express within each work of art and each building the hierarchy and the timeless order of the Shahjahani rule. Noteworthy in particular is Shah Jahan’s own involvement in the organization of history, art, and architecture to create his own personal ideology of power.
The reigns of Shah Jahan and Jahangir have been the least studied periods of Mughal history; the attention of scholars has been directed mainly to the reigns of Akbar and Aurangzeb. One of the reasons for this neglect seems to be that the major historical texts of the reign of Shah Jahan, written, as all Mughal historiography, in Persian, are still untranslated and exist to a large extent. only in a manuscript form which considerably limits access to them. But there also seems to be a more deeply rooted bias, especially against the reign of Shah Jahan. In contrast to the reign of Akbar, which is considered to be the grand phase of Mughal state building, and the reign of Aurangzeb, which is regarded as marking the beginning of Mughal decline, historians see the reign of Shah Jahan as a static and thus uninteresting phase which simply preserved the status quo established by Akbar." This view tells us perhaps more about the effectiveness and longevity of Shahjahani propaganda, which emphasized the continuity and everlastingness of the emperor’s rule, than about the actual historical situation. But when history and art history combine their findings, the reign of Shah Jahan emerges as a highly assertive and innovative phase when imperial authority assumed absolute and central power never before and never after reached in Mughal history. The Shahjahani concept of continuity was strongly linked to ideas of a new beginning. Shah Jahan claimed to be a renewer, a mujaddid whose rule ended an era of decline.'’? The arts played a key role in the propagation of his imperial claims, and their aesthetic appeal should not induce us to underrate their historical significance.
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