indian paintings from the deccan

INDIAN PAINTINGS FROM THE DECCANAuthor(s): EDWIN BINNEYSource: Journal of the Royal Society of Arts, Vol. 127, No. 5280 (NOVEMBER 1979), pp. 784-804Published by: Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and CommerceStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/41373866 .

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INDIAN PAINTINGS FROM

THE DECCAN

I The Sir George Birdwood Memorial Lecture by I

I EDWIN В IN NEY, 3rd , PhD I

Research Fellow, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, delivered to the Commonwealth Section of the Society on Thursday 3rd May 1979 , with Mildred Archer , OBE ', D Litt, India Office Library , in the Chair

The Chairman: This is the 57th Birdwood Memorial Lecture, and once again it is devoted to the suj beet of Indian painting. As many of you probably know. Sir George Birdwood was a doctor in the Bombay Medical Establishment from 1854 to 1 868, when he had to retire on grounds of ill health. But he never lost his love for India, and during the rest of his long life he continued to be one of the chief interpreters of Indian culture in England. It seems highly appropriate, therefore, that from time to time pioneer talks on Indian painting should be made in the course of this series. In 1957 my husband spoke on the courts and patrons of the Punjab Hills at a time when the subject was first being discussed. In 1969 B. N. Goswamy lectured from his original research material on artist families in the Punjab Hills. To-day we are going to have a talk on the early phases of painting in the Deccan, and this too is a subject which can still be controversial and is still relatively unexplored.

Our lecturer is Edwin Binney 3rd. I hope he will forgive me if I say that he is an extra- ordinary and improbable character ! He began his academic life teaching French at Harvard for six years, and in 1965 his book on Théophile Gautier was published in French. He is now the curator of the Ballet Collections at Harvard and has catalogued the dance prints in the Harvard Theatre Collection. Recently he has mounted touring exhibitions on Odilon Redon and on the French Romantic Print and Delacroix. He himself has one of the largest private collections of ballet prints in the world. This interest was

i

triggered off by the fact that he himself was once a ballet dancer and for a time had a small ballet company; and he married his ballet teacher, Alicia Langford, who is with us this afternoon. But at the same time Dr. Binney has been build- ing up a huge collection of Persian, Turkish and Indian miniatures and manuscripts. He probably has the most comprehensive collection of Indian paintings in private hands outside India.

But he is not just a collector who sits and gloats over his collection in private. He is a great educator, he lectures widely, he is an adviser on purchases of Islamic material to several museums in the States, and he is a Research Fellow at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Over the years he has mounted numerous exhibitions of material from his own collection. He circulates these to museums in the States which otherwise would never see material of that type. He is also extremely generous of his time with students and with people who want to see his collection. I remember in 1977 when we went to the Los Angeles Colloquium on Pahari painting he invited the whole group out to San Diego, gave them luncheon and then let them loose with his pictures.

But what I think is most important of all - he produces catalogues raisonnés of his collections. He has published ones on Mughal, Rajput, Deccani, Persian and just recently on Turkish paintings. We are all hoping to obtain a copy of that soon.

I almost forgot - he has another accomplish- ment : he is a skin diver for lobster and scallops !

The following lecture , which was illustrated , was then delivered

IT least 'foreigner'

is

one

somewhat - kind

even of if presumptuous

English he speaks - to

English, come

for

to at a

'foreigner' - even if he speaks English, at least one kind of English - to come to

London to speak on a subject whose three

784

greatest specialists live here. It is the perfect example of 'Coals to Newcastle'. However, as an author of an exhibition catalogue in 1973 which presented 60 Deccani miniatures,



NOVEMBER I979 INDIAN PAINTINGS FROM THE DECCAN

Figure i

along with 100 Mughal ones, I have some acquaintance with the subject, if not the ex- pertise of the three scholars whose contributions to the field I should now like to list.

First of them is Douglas Barrett. During the 1950s when Faber and Faber Limited was publishing the Faber Gallery of Oriental Art, Mr. Barrett published one of the two books on Persian painting, and one of the six devoted to Indian painting. It is a great pity that the Fabers did not continue. Each of the series presented a short 'overview' of its subject with ten colour plates and an introductory essay geared to the 'interested general public', rather than to the scholar. (I sincerely hope that this afternoon, there are more of the former listening to me than of the latter!) Mr. Barrett's Painting of the Deccan XV I- XV I I Century appeared in 1958. It presented the 'overview' of its

subject inherent in the publication, and immediately replaced Stella Kramrisch's A Survey of Painting in the Deccan , which had been published in 1937 and was already very difficult to obtain - at least in the section devoted to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The Barrett plates were the following :

pl. i The Dohada scene from the Tarif -i- Husain Shahi, the earliest Deccani manuscript. It is one of the 12 extant paintings in the book - pre- served at the Itihasa Samshodhaka Mandala Library in Poona. (*i)t

t This paper, being the published form of the Sir George Birdwood Memorial Lecture for 1979, is supposed to conform in a general way to the lecture as delivered. The number of reproductions herewith, however, is much reduced from those presented as slides at the lecture. When a slide was projected that is not published herewith, an asterisk * with the number of the slide within parentheses () is inserted into the text. In refer- ences to the illustrations published in these pages the figure numbers are printed in bold type.

785



JOURNAL OF THE ROYAL SOCIETY OF ARTS NOVEMBER 1979

Figure 2

pl. 2 A leaf from the Nujum-ul-Ulum manuscript in the Sir Chester Beatty Library, Dublin. (*2)

pl.3 A ragamala illustration in the National Museum, New Delhi. (*3)

pl. 4 A second illustration from the same, or similar, ragamala, also in New Delhi. (*4)

pl. 5 A portrait of one of the Nizam Shahs of Ahmadnagar at the Bibliothèque nationale , Paris. (*5)

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pl. 6 The well-known 'Siesta' in Berlin. (*6) pl. 7 A lady with a myna bird - also

called a royal yogini - again in the Beatty Library. (*7)

pl. 8 A darbar scene of one of the Qutb Shahs of Golconda, in the British Museum - now the British Library. (*8)

pl. 9 A bust portrait of Muhammad Adii Shah of Bijapur, also in the British Museum. (*9)




Figure 3

pl. 10 A portrait of a prince seated on a European-style chair in a garden, attended by four ladies, one of whom is dressed in Portuguese costume. This last example also came from the Beatty Library. (*10)

(It is curiously indicative of the status of ownership of these early Deccani miniatures, that only three of these ten chosen by Barrett in 1958 were still in India. Now, twenty years later, it is likely that even fewer than 30 per cent of all known comparable material still remains there.)

Barrett's introduction contained much of interest. 'The rulers of Ahmadnagar, Bijapur and Golconda were strangers to Akbar's purposeful energy. Their history reads with the inconsequence of an operatic libretto. . . . Akbar's paintings give the impression that these things were the official adjuncts of a great court. With the rulers of the Deccan they were a passion.' (Op. cit., p. 2). In the field of Deccani painting, we owe much to Douglas Barrett.

Second of this indomitable trio is Robert Skelton. His 'Documents for the Study of

787




Figure 4

Painting at Bijapur' appeared in Volume V of Arts asiatiques , also in 1958. It is a scholarly essay, concentrating on specific portraits of Ibrahim Adii Shah II who ruled Bijapur from 1580 to 1627. This king was a noted musician, author and art patron; his six great courtiers included a mathematician, calligrapher, historian, poet, and wit, as well as Farrukh Husain, one of the few Deccani painters known by name. Skelton presented the known portraits of the great Bij apuri patron, and several that were otherwise unknown at that time. Foremost among these

788

was 'the processional portrait' in the collection of the Maharaja of Bikaner (Skelton, fig. 2) (*11). This picture had reached Bikaner as part of the booty taken in the Deccani fortress of Adoni which had fallen to an ancestor of the Bikaner rajah in 1691. Heinrich Goetz had previously published this portrait in 1950 as one of the colour plates of his Art and Architecture of Bikaner State (Oxford University Press).

Skelton also published other Ibrahim portraits - a somewhat later one in the British Museum (Skelton, fig. 5) (*12),




Figure 5

which has subsequently been labelled simply 'a musician', as the sultan is shown snapping clappers. Another was a much later copy of a lost Deccani original - probably by the Mughal artist Mir Kalan Khan, in the collection of the Earl of Harro wby (Skelton, fig. 4) (*13). The inclusion of a colour plate of a pair of cranes in the Musée Guimet, fragment of a larger picture (Skelton, fig. 6) (*14), did little to detract from Skelton's major contribution, a list of 17 portraits of Ibrahim both contemporary with his reign and later also.

Two years after the original Barrett and Skelton publications, W. G. Archer issued an excellent 'guide-book' on the whole of

Indian painting, Indian Miniatures (New York and London, i960). Naturally, he presented several early Deccani pictures, including the late Mughal Harrowby portrait of Ibrahim II, previously published by Skelton. He also presented a gorgeous picture of a Prince Hawking, in the India Office Library. (*15)

The same year Douglas Barrett published five miniatures included in a manuscript of the Diwan of Hafiz in the British Museum, but not related to that text. He had mentioned them under plate 8 of his Faber book in 1958 and now concentrated on them in an article for the seventh number of the Indian art journal Lalit Kala. (*16) The

789




Figure 6

article was entitled 'Some Unpublished Deccani Miniatures' and also presented a Golconda Nativity Scene in the Freer Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., and a splendid Bijapur portrait of Ali Adii Shah II in the collection of Dr. Moti Chandra in Bombay. (*17) It seemed almost fortuitous to see Indian presentation of its own painting traditions, even if the author was, in this case, British.

Indian publications, however, continued to present Deccani material. Marg , another Indian art journal which appeared quarterly, presented a varied potpourri in its March 1963 issue - 'Deccani Kalams' There were sections by British, American and Indian authors, one of whom, like the present speaker, is a collector, Sri Jagdish Mittal, of Hyderabad. His contributions to the issue of Marg , including 'Paintings of the Hydera- bad School' and 'Deccani Paintings at the Samasthans of Wanaparthy, Gadwal and Shorapur' are not of present concern but introduce another scholar-collector who will present his own early Deccani material at

790

some hopefully not- too-future date. Still another, somewhat later, Indian

publication was that of the late Sir Cowasji Jehangir, Bt, collection by Karl Khandala- vala and Moti Chandra in 1965. It contained much previously unpublished early Deccani material, including another portrait of Ali Adii Shah II (*i8).

We are now fully into the War of the Noses! Unlike its English manifestation in the fifteenth century with Red and White Roses, this twentieth century derivation features the parties of cthe Hooked' and 'the Straight.' The problem concerns certain

I of the portraits of Ibrahim Adii Shah II of Bijapur which feature a straight nose, while others, including the supposedly realistic ' Mughal ones, showed a strong hook in the same nose!

The battle continued during the same year 1963, when the Skira book, Painting in India , appeared. Basil Gray and Douglas Barrett both collaborated on the volume. Gray himself had published articles on Deccani painting in the 1930s, and now he,



NOVEMBER I979 INDIAN PAINTINGS FROM THE DEČCAN

Figure 7

rather than Barrett, wrote the section on Tainting in the Deccan' Additional leaves from the Tarif-i-Husain Shahi (*19), the early ragamala series (*20), and the Beatty Nujum-ul-Ulum (*21) were featured, as well as previously published ones - ťthe Swing' from the early ragamala, and the dancing scene inserted into the British Museum Diwan of Hafiz. To join the already known Ibrahim Adii Shah II with clappers was a contemporary courtier from the Bijapur court (*22). The corpus of known Deccani material was growing.

Fortunately the major battles of the War of the Noses were indecisive, and we reach the later 1960s without too much blood-

shed. Before the decade was out, however, Douglas Barrett had again published. His Tainting at Bijapur' appeared in Paintings from Islamic Lands (R. Pinder-Wilson, editor, 1969). He had again found a little- known text in the British Museum and published it in extenso. This RatanKhan , or Pern Nem manuscript ( The Law [or Lore] of Love ) was written in Deccani Urdu by Hasan Manjhu Khalji in 1590. The twelve miniatures were the product of several different painters, painted shortly after the text (*23, *24).

The 1970s have done much to disseminate further information about early Deccani painting and to popularize it. 1973 was a

791




Figure 8

particular 'banner year'. Robert Skelton's 'Early Golconda Painting,' originally in Indolegen-Tagung dated 1971, finally appeared in Wiesbaden two years later. In it he traced the whole history of our knowledge of these miniatures from Ernst Kühnel's first publication of the Berlin ' Siesta ' in 1922. 'At that time', Skelton stated, 'early schools of painting in the Deccan were quite unknown to students of Indian art.' (Op. cit., p.i.) He underlined the sketchiness of our own knowledge a half century later by properly identifying a seated courtier in the darbar scene published by Barrett in 1958 (plate 8 there). This grey-beard was Sheikh Muhammad ibn Khatun, an important advisor to Abdullah Qutb Shah (1626-72), who had left India with a Persian embassy from Shah Abbas when it returned home in 161 6, and had remained there until 1627 when he again appeared at the Golconda court (*25). j Barrett's identification of the ruler at the darbar as Muhammad Qutb Shah (1580- 1612) and a correlated dating of c.1610-1615

792

for the picture now became untenable. The seated minister, or rather his uncharacter- istic position, was identifiable even if the ruler was not. From such minutiae , or from straight or hooked noses, is art history made.

Other major events in 1973 were Cary Welch's exhibition 'A Flower from Every Meadow', which began the year at Asia House in New York and other museums, and my own Mughal-Deccani show at Portland, Oregon, on the West Coast, which ended the year, before a three-year tour of American museums, f The Welch presentation included only nine Deccani pictures - of which seven were of the early periods - but they comprised 11 per cent of the

! exhibition. A young graduate student at Harvard University, already doing research on early Deccani pictures, wrote five of these catalogue entries. His name was Mark

t Shortly after the closing of these two American exhibition tours, the London World of Islam Festival in 1976, Paintings from the Muslim Courts of Indiai featured 23 catalogue entries of Deccani paintings (30 miniatures listed as 'perhaps a third of the finest paintings to have survived' ( Cat p. 89).



NOVEMBER 1979 INDIAN PAINTINGS FROM THE DECCAN

Figure 9

Zebrowski. That initial research has now become a doctoral disertation.f The pre- vious publications have been assimilated to provide grist for a more complete mill. An immense photographic archive has allowed dating for most of the published Deccani material, and unpublished pictures also. 'A new broom sweeps clean!'

Until now, I have purposely avoided list- ing datings or exact provenance, if they might have been, or still can be, open to discussion. Now, after Zebrowski thesis, it is

t The Zebrowski thesis, as yet unpublished, exists only in the form in which it was presented to Harvard University. It remains in typescript in the University Archives.

possible to consider a reasonably complete chronology for painting in each of the three Deccani kingdoms. My lecture can now begin !

The Deccan is the high plateau that stretches across the north and middle section of the peninsula of India, as opposed to the India of the Ganges and Indus River valleys. Toward the end of the fifteenth century, the Bahmani kingdom which had ruled the whole area was weakened and separate provinces revolted to become in- dependent states (*26-map). There were originally five of these sultanates, but two, Berar and Bidar, were shortly swallowed up by the more powerful neighbours. Of these,

793




Figure io

Ahmadnagar held pride of place. Her King Husain Nizam Shah was the leader of the Muslim alliance which destroyed the Hindu Kingdom of Vijayanagar at the Battle of Talikota in 1565. It is fitting that the earliest Deccani miniature paintings come from his kingdom, and eulogize his rule - the Tarif -i- j Husain Shahi (*27). Each historian of the ! whole of Deccani painting has insisted on the crucial importance of this series : - Stella Kramrisch in 1937, Douglas Barrett in 1958 and Basil Gray in 1963. Mark Zebrowski shows two of the miniatures of the twelve that remain in the volume in Poona and labels them painter ťA i'

794

The other early Ahmadnagar picture which Barrett used in 1958 (plate 5) was that of a Nizam Shah whom he called Burhan II, thereby dating the picture between 1591 and 1595. Zebrowski insists that the sitter is Murtaza Nizam Shah, son of Husain of the Tariff whose reign lasted from 1565 to 1588. The identity of the sultan is less important than the existence and knowledge of this Bibliothèque nationale portrait which im- pelled an American private collector to purchase a drawing of a galloping elephant whose mahout resembles the sitter of the Paris portrait (*28). The miniature figured in the first Sevadjian sale in Paris (23rd




Figure ii

Nov. i960) which I attended. I should love to be able to confess that I brought that picture ! Alas, it was another collector, more prescient than I. If I do not own an example of the work of Painter A6, artist of the galloping elephant, I do own a work by Zebrowski's Painter A7 (*29, Figure 1). It shows a young prince with a very young girl. Because of his hat, which resembles other headgear previously associated with Bijapur, the drawing has always been so published. Now, because of the Zebrowski thesis where it figures as plate 14, it is properly attributed to Ahmadnagar, dated

between about 1580 and 1600 with a possible identification as the ten-year-old Husain Nizam Shah with his future wife, a Bijapuri princess - sister of Ibrahim Adii Shah II (Thesis, p. 28).

A second phase of Ahmadnagar painting begins after the capture of the city by the Mughals in 1600. Malik Ambar, an Abys- sinian functionary at the Nizam Shahi court, resisted the Mughals, placed a series of puppet princes on the throne under his own peshwaship, and finally recaptured Ahmadnagar itself. He died in 1621, but his son continued the resistance to the

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Journal of the royal society of arts November 1979

Figure 12

Mughals. From this period come ten portraits, nine of black Africans, one with a light skin. Earliest of the group, showing the least Mughal influence, is mine (*30, Figure 2), which I labelled Golconda, c. 1660-80 when I published it first. I imagined it to be a later copy from a series of Deccani personages. Zebrowski (plate 17) places it securely in Ahmadnagar, c. 1610-20.

Painting in Bijapur begins, like that of Ahmadnagar, with a major manuscript which has remained almost complete. For this second of the Deccani kingdoms, it is the Nujum-ul-Ulum (Stars of the Sciences ) at the Beatty Library, Dublin (*31, *32). It is dated in several places to correspond to ad 1570. Again, as with the slightly earlier Ahmadnagar T ar if -i- Husain- Shahi , the his- torians of Deccani painting have all published miniatures from it: Kramrisch (1937), Barrett (1958) and Gray (1963). Dr. Zebrowski includes two plates. He also mentions a 'stray leaf' in my collection. It is not so much a 'stray' as a 'souvenir'. While

796

F. R. Martin sold the manuscript to Chester Beatty, Professor R. A. Dara ex- tracted one leaf for himself. It shows the conjuring up of Magical Spirits (*33, Figure 3).

The reign of the great patron Ibrahim Adii Shah II (1579- 1627) was a high point for Bijapuri painting. His famous courtiers, including the painter Farrukh Husain, have already been mentioned. Skelton's 1958 article has listed his portraits, although he was unable to include two others : - one of a young man in an Indian private collection (*34), and another in mine (*35, Figure 4), still unknown at the time of his publication. Mine was, however, exhibited at the British Library in 1976. Zebrowski attributes it to painter B4, along with miniatures of a Muslim Holy Man in the India Office Library and the 'stout courtier' in the British Museum (slide shown previously). A date of c. 16 10- 1620 seems correct for these three pictures.

Slightly earlier and related to works by Farrukh Husain is a picture of an elephant balking at crossing a ford (*36, Figure 5). Zebrowski places it within a 'fourth idiom' of Bijapuri painting, during the reign of Ibrahim II, more Persian than those he lists previously, which include some of the finest masterpieces of Indian painting featuring an elegant synthesis of elements both foreign and Indian, both non-Deccani and Deccani. In this 'fourth idiom' are other pictures of Ibrahim himself, or horses and grooms, and of still other elephants, including a partially coloured drawing of two elephants in combat (*37, Figure 6). According to Zebrowski, it is by the same hand as the elephant at the ford.

Ibrahim was succeeded by Muhammad Adii Shah (1627-56). During his reign, a new kind of realism appears in Bijapur painting. The depiction of real people re- places the presentation of ideal forms. The problem of Ibrahim's nose - hooked or straight - now becomes minor. His painters might present an 'ideal image' of him. Muhammad's would paint a more realistic scene. The transition can be noted in another portrait of Ibrahim appearing at a window in the dar shan pose (*38, Figure 7), the Deccani equivalent of a Papal blessing from the Vatican balcony. The courtier beside him may possibly be Shah Nawaz Khan, prime minister both to Ibrahim and to Muhammad. The date is probably between 1620 and 1630. The newly-used




Figure 13

realism will also appear in darbar scenes, heretofore uncommon in Deccani painting. My example shows Muhammad Adii Shah surrounded by courtiers, including a page behind him who wields the ubiquitous Deccani fly-whisk (*39, Figure 8).

A fine darbar scene with Muhammad, dated 164 1-2, is in the collection of the Jaipur Palace. It is signed 'Muhammad Khan farzan-i-Miyan Chand', and shows the painter as a courtier petitioning for his stipend. A unique self-portrait of the artist! The use of the Persian 'farzanď instead of the Arabic 'ibn' for 'son' underlines the continuous Iranian influence in Deccani painting. A similar inscription, but this one effaced, once was written across the pillow on which this high Bij apuri official sits (*40, Figure 9). He is Ikhlas Khan, not Masud Khan, a later prime minister, as I labelled him in the Mughal-Deccani catalogue. Although I regret the absence of miniatures from the reigns of Ali Adii Shah II and his son Sikander, last sultan before the final conquest of the state by Aurangzeb

in 1686, the existing works present a valid overview of Bijapuri painting.

Golconda painting will be even more eclectic than that of Ahmadnagar and Bijapur. Zebrowski labels it "the most speculative of the Deccani schools'. The presence of Persian and Bukharan painters, perhaps also a Turkish one, and their Indian pupils, make for obvious confusion. From early Qutb Shahi reigns before 1580 and the advent of Muhammad Quii there exists a series of manuscripts which Zebrowski places in four separate categories. There are those of 'Reliable Golconda provenance', 'Dated but without Golconda provenance', and 'Undated, without Golconda provenance'. The fourth group embraces 'detached pages', including 25 of provincial provenance resembling Bukharan painting in the India Office Library, and two of mine. The first shows a polo scene (*41, Figure 10). The Iranian background of the batoned- turbans is immediately obvious. But the niches above with drummers and the thinness of the horsemen are not Persian

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Figure 14

practise, but rather Golcondan. The seal on the album page is that of Muhammad Quii Qutb Shah who later owned the album page, and perhaps the whole of the manuscript whose introductory, illuminated un- wan and beginning text is on the verso (*42, Figure 11). The quality of this illumi- nation relates the work to a particularly fine Koran dated 1537 in the Salar Jang Museum, Hyderabad. The second detached page features an execution scene from an unidentified manuscript (*43, Figure 12).

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This Muhammad Quii Qutb Shah (1580- 161 2) was the greatest Golconda patron, and contemporary of his Bijapur co-patron, Ibrahim Adii Shah II. He was India's first great Urdu poet, the manuscript of whose Kulliyat (< Collected Works ) in the Salar Jang Museum is one of the most lavish of all Indo-Muslim illustrated books. He was also the founder of Hyderabad in 1591 - soon to become one of the finest cities in India.

Muhammad Quli's successor was his nephew and son-in-law Muhammad Qutb




Figure 15

Shah (1612-26). He was the ruler identified by Barrett as the prince in the darbar published in the Faber Book (plate 8). Skelton later identified the seated Shaikh Muhammad ibn Khatun from the court of Abdullah Qutb Shah (1626-72), and forced a later dating for the picture. From early in Abdullah's reign, and compiled for him, comes a text, the Fawaid-i-Qutb- Shahi , dated 1629-30, which is now in the National Museum, New Delhi. It is a text in praise of the ruling dynasty of Golconda. How and why seven leaves were removed

from it and came into the Gerald Reitlinger collection until 1954, I do not know. I do know that when the leaves were sold at Sotheby's (7th Dec. 1971, lot 326), they found a very good home! (*44, Figure 13)

Later Golconda painting becomes in- creasingly derivative, borrowing themes and technique from imperial Mughal miniatures. As the sitters for portraits become more recognizable, they correspondingly become less interesting; they stand before empty Shah-Jahan-like green backgrounds, secure in their European-inspired haloes.

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Figure 16

Even the best of them appear to suffer from some unexplained boredom (*45, *46). But other foreign influences also appear in certain late pictures. Shaikh Abbasi, son of the great Persian Riza-i- Abbasi (d.1635), probably painted in Hyderabad. A portrait of a young prince mounted on an elephant, dated 1675-76, bearing his signature, remains in the Musée Guimet. By one of his Indian followers is a three-quarter length portrait of Nazar Khan of Balkh (*47, Figure 14). Zebrowski calls this artist 'Gii'. A similar hybrid is the prince seated in the European-style chair from the Beatty Library, reproduced by Barrett in 1958 (Faber, plate 10). Another is a courtesan whose landscape and album leaf are as

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gorgeous as she is 'lumpy' (*48). The exact opposite is a contemporary portrait of a similar nude lady. Her beauty belongs solely to her - her album leaf must be ignored so as not to detract from her willowy elegance (*49, Figure 15).

Painters identified by 'G' numbers in Zebrowski' s thesis follow one another from the mid-seventeenth century until the extinction of the Kingdom of Golconda in 1687. 'Gi4' was the artist of a magnificent hunting scene in an American private collection. The large section from it, shown herewith (*50), figured on the dust jacket of Cary Welch's 'Flower from Every Meadow' catalogue at Asia House. Painter ťGi7' is the last Golconda artist listed by




FIGUREJI7

Zebrowski. His masterpiece is a standing portrait of Abul Hasan Qutb Shah (1672- 87), called Tana Shah, the 'King of Taste', (*51, Figure 16). It is the last plate of the thesis (plate 99), and is proclaimed ťa superb late painting . . . The importance of the painting is not the depiction of his individuality but the evocation of a perfect world and the grandeur of its soverign' (op. cit., p. 190).

As with 'the hen and the egg', it is of little importance whether the extinction of the kingdoms of Bijapur and Golconda or the end of the Zebrowski thesis came first. Yet even with its exhaustive treatment, all has not been satisfactorily explained. There remain three questions to be treated, or at

least presented. They may be peripheral to the major discussion of the artistic evolution of Deccani painting, but they must still be considered for a moment. First, where are a series of astronomical and astrological leaves to be placed ? They come from a very large manuscript of the Ajaib al-Makhluqat by Qazvini and are generally ascribed to the Deccan in the first part of the seventeenth century or earlier (*52, *53). The reasoning is simple - they are of a Persian text, by a Persian author, yet seem evolved beyond standard Iranian practice. They are like no known Mughal work, and, as Mughal painting is better known than that of the Deccan - or has been until very recently - they have been labelled Deccani by default.

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Figure 18

Hopefully, someone will resolve this problem soon.f

Another kind of miniature also deserves study to establish exact provenance and dating. We are on somewhat surer ground than with the Qazvini illustrations. For Deccani interest in, and mastery of, the complicated process of marbling paper is already well known. Will we ever be able competently to attribute works like the following to specific aesthetic centre or period? The first example shows a female devotee in prayer, kneeling on a finely- lined ground which is covered by flowering vegetation (*54, Figure 17). The second, from the collection of Jagdish Mittal, was featured in the Asia House exhibition

t A new article by Julie Badiee, in the Los Angeles County Museum of Art Bulletin 1978 , 'Angels in an Islamic Heaven' (pp. 5o-59)> helps to resolve this problem. Assistant Professor Badiee correctly takes exception to the provenance and dating for a similar leaf that the present author incorrectly attributed to 'Syria or Egypt, 13th century ( ?)' at the time of the precipitous prepara- tion of the Heeramaneck Islamic Collection Catalogue for that Museum (Pratapaditya Pal, ed., 1973). She more correctly attributes the paintings on the recto and verso of the Los Angeles leaf (M 73.5.585) to 'Deccan, probably Bijapur, 1571/2 A.D.' She bases her conclusions on similar iconography on leaves in the India Office Library (Loth 723 and 724) and the British Library (Or. 4701).

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'Indian Drawings and Painted Sketches' in 1976. The repulsiveness of the epicene 'lady' is greatly enhanced by its marbling (*55). Perhaps even finer is a complete leaf - all marbled - showing a tiger hunting in a field of deer (*56, Figure 18). The elements in the scene, in addition to their marbling, are cut out and pasted on to the background - a marbled, découpé album page. Our lack of knowledge as to exact location in no way detracts from the aesthetic mastery of these leaves. But it would still be helpful to find a 'willing hand' to fill in still another gap in our knowledge of Deccani painting.

The third of these 'unidentified categories' is by far the most important. We must go back to the beginning of this lecture, for it was Barrett in the Faber book (1958) who published two leaves from a ragamala series which includes some of the greatest masterpieces of Deccani painting (*57, dupl. of *4 above). Vasanta Raga, with music and verses related to spring, is most often connected with Krishna dancing. Here, however, the iconography is closer to Hindola - the raga whose lord sits in a



NOVEMBER 1979 INDIAN PAINTINGS FROM THE DECCAN

Figure 19

swing. And the Persian characters above refer to both 'Hindola Rag' and ťVasant Ragini' The problem for the exact local- ization of these ragamala leaves lies in the lengthy Sanskrit verses above each scene. Barrett also reproduced another ragini which he attributed to Bijapur c. 1590- 1600 (*58, dupl. of *3 above). The Vasanta (or Hindola) he gave to Ahmadnagar, c.1591-5. Both leaves were in the National Museum, New Delhi; each originally from the collection of the Maharajah of Bikaner.

The supposed Bij apuri leaf belonged to a group of ten miniatures, nine from Bikaner,

one in the Baroda Museum, the latter, Malavi Ragini (*59). Other miniatures, remaining in Bikaner, were Dhanasri (*60), reproduced by Archer in i960, and the Khamghodi (*61). Barrett (Faber, p. 10) also mentioned that 'a further example in the Bharat Kala Bhavan, Bañaras, is in the same style, though not perhaps from the same seť (*62). A footnote to Barrett's text mentions still others, two of which, then unpublished, were in the Jodhpur collection and that of Motichand Khaj anchi. The Khaj anchi leaf was published by Gray in 1963, and previously by Lalit Kala (i960)

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at the time of an exhibition which eventually resulted in that major private collection ending in the National Museum, New Delhi, (*63, dupl. of *20).

Under the Vasanta Raga text, Barrett mentioned still other leaves, one in the collection of Sri Gopi Krishna Kanoria and ťa third set in the [Sviatoslav] Roehrich collection [which] remains unpublished.' He did not mention the presence of the only non-Indian holding of similar ragamala leaves - a series of later copies in the Victoria and Albert Museum. 'Bahuli' is among these (*64), as is Varari (*65).

This lengthy 'straining' may produce emore camels to swallow than gnats' but at least underlines the importance, not to say beauty, of these exquisite pictures. When Klaus Ebeling in his exhaustive Ragamala Painting (Ravi Kumar, Basel, Paris, New Delhi, 1973) attempted to codify this series as '6' (within a horizontal oval) he could only explain: 'The Raga-Ragini paintings included here are very likely from several sets, which, however, are not always clearly separable. They may never have been a part of a Ragamala' (op. cit., p. 155). He therefore listed the known leaves according to their date of publication in the various books and articles we have already studied, and earlier ones also. He also included my leaf - Gauri ragini (*66, Figure 19). It is exceptional in several ways. First, it is as lovely as any of the others ! More important, it is the only original example in a 'Western', as opposed to Indian, collection. Finally, it is probably my finest Deccani miniature.

It is obvious that over and above the art historical importance of a 'demotion' of a major series of Hindu subject in Dr. Zebrowski's chronology of three Islamic

November 1979

sultanates, there is a very personal dis- appointment. It is easy to be unbiased and to follow the thesis reasoning that the text above each ragamala illustration is too adulterated to belong to an elegant court like that of Ibrahim Adii Shah II in Bijapur. But to have to face the ignominy of this 'failure' of a series of masterpieces to measure up to the now-recognized chronology of Muslim painting in the Deccan, is even more difficult for a lecturer who is also a private collector ! The existence and personality of the 'probably Hindu patron in the northwest Deccan' (thesis, p. 64) who may have commissioned this series, or 'series' in the plural, is soon to become a mania.

One is tempted to leave our 'mutual' language and to retreat to the classics. How many of us remember the examples of the vocative case in Latin? ' Et tu, Brute?" is the one best known. But evoke the chagrin of the Emperor Augustus while learning the destruction of legions in the army of General Varus in the German Teuto- berger Forest: ' Vare, Varel ubi sunt meae legiones ?' I feel like extemporizing: 'Marce, Marce, ubi sunt nostrae ragamalae ?'

The Chairman : I think that you will all agree that, although Dr. Binney began by saying that he was bringing coals to Newcastle, this was not at all true. He has certainly done a great deal to clarify the problems of Decanni painting and to give us clear examples of the various schools flourishing at Ahmadnagar, Bijapur and Gol- conda. We have seen a wonderful range of slides and I think those from his own collection show us what a great connoisseur he is. So on behalf of all of us I should like to thank him for a delightful and stimulating lecture.

The meeting concluded amidst acclamation.

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