Mughal Chronicles: Words, Images and the Gaps In Between

About the Speaker

Kavita Singh is a Professor of Art History and currently the Dean at the School of Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, where she teaches courses on the history of Indian painting and the history and politics of museums. She has published essays on issues of colonial history, repatriation, secularism and religiosity, fraught national identities, and the memorialization of difficult histories as they relate to museums in South Asia and beyond. She has also published on Indian painting, especially on the interrelationship of meaning and style. Her books include Real Birds in Imagined Gardens: Mughal Painting Between Persia and Europe (Getty Research Institute, 2017), Museums, Heritage, Culture: Into the Conflict Zone (Reinwardt Academy, Amsterdam University of the Arts, 2015) and the edited and co-edited volumes Scent Upon a Southern Breeze: The Synaesthetic Arts of the Deccan (Marg Publications, 2018), (with Mirjam Brusius) Museum Storage and Meaning: Tales from the Crypt (Routledge, 2017), (with Preeti B Ramaswamy) Nauras: The Many Arts of the Deccan (National Museum, 2015), (with Saloni Mathur) No Touching, No Spitting, No Praying: The Museum in South Asia (Routledge, 2014) and New Insights into Sikh Art (Marg, 2003). She has curated exhibitions at the San Diego Museum of Art, the Devi Art Foundation, Jawaharlal Nehru University, and the National Museum of India. She has received fellowships and grants from the Getty Research Institute, the Max Planck Institute, the Clark Institute, the Victoria and Albert Museum and the Asia Society of New York.

Abstract

All of the Great Mughals either wrote memoirs or commissioned chronicles of their reigns. Although these books were produced in a broad range of literary styles, from informal diaristic memoirs to ornate belle-lettristic texts, it is only in the time of Akbar that they became the subject of illustration. From then on, the production of a grand illustrated version of the emperor's biography or memoir became a major preoccupation for the imperial atelier, and paintings made to illustrate the Akbarnama, Jahangirnama and Padshahnama are among the most celebrated works of Mughal art. Valued as they are as artistic masterpieces, they are also seen as valuable historic records that offer a unique window into the Mughal world.

The paintings in these books, however, were not simply illustrations that followed the texts. In many cases, the images diverged significantly from the words written on the facing page. Sometimes images offered an alternative interpretation of events. At other times, the painted narrative remained faithful to the letter, but not to the spirit, of the text. As a result, the reader would be presented with two different versions of the same historical incident within the covers of the same book through the images and through the text.

Studying the text-image relationship in select examples from the Akbarnama, the Jahangirnama and the Padshahnama, this talk speculates that some of the significance of these books lay in not just the words and the images, but in the gap between the two – a gap that the reader had to fill with meaning, producing a semantics of her own.

Report

This paper is a response to the talk by Professor Kavika Singh of Jawaharlal Nehru University on “Mughal Chronicles: Words, Images and the Gaps In Between”. Professor Singh explored the illustrations in three Mughal chronicles: The Akbarnama, The Jahangirnama and The Padshahnama to understand the gap between the text and the written word, and what does this mean to the larger history of the Mughal Empire.

For the purpose of this talk; she used three images, one from each of the chronicles of the Emperor, and compared the gap between what actually happened as described in the book. She analysed the reason for this gap, and what did the paintings actually depict.

The first image was from the Padshahnama and depicted the scene of the death of Khan Jahan Lodi, a Mughal commander who had rebelled against Shah Jahan. The gap in the image lies in the fact that the killing is not done by his actual killers but by two unnamed men, whose only identification mark is that they belong to Shah Jahan’s army. The two main actors are given a side position where they are mere onlookers. Professor Singh imposes this image to the painting of the royal durbar, which had all its important courtiers in a higher plane than normal people, therefore justifying the space given to these two soldiers. The heroic act was committed not by particular people but only loyal servants of the Emperor. Professor Singh also discussed how the chinar tree on the top part of the picture, can be an allegory for the Emperor himself, fitting perfectly into the court painting module.

The next image was from the illustrations of the Jahangirnama, which displayed Jahangir receiving the imprisoned Mirza Husain, a supporter of his traitor son Khusrau. The gap in this image is very evident by both the tombs of Jahangir’s parents in the background. Also, there is a church in the background which is from a much later period and a constant motif in paintings about Jahangir. Another major deviation from the text is that Aziz Khoka, who is barely mentioned in the text that this image is illustrating, finds an important place in the painting.

The final image is from the second Akbarnama, which depicts a drunken party scene, where Akbar, in a drunken state, runs towards a sword, which might have killed him off. Raja Man Singh saves him by running to remove the sword but Akbar again in drunken state throttles Man Singh. In the image, another of Akbar’s courtiers is trying to free Man Singh from Akbar. The image is interesting as it doesn’t follow any traditional style of painting and instead portrays Akbar at a much lower level than many of his courtiers. It also portrays him on the left side of the page which is very rare in the illustrations. The gaps with the text are very evident as the text always valorizes Akbar and doesn't find a single flaw in his actions. Therefore, the image not only portrays Akbar’s vulnerability but also humanizes him.

So what does this divergence represent? First, it represents the presence of the lack of style in paintings. It also represents an Emperor's personal choice and how his courtiers, writers and artists interpret that choice. And finally, the divergence also represents the difference in the medium of image and word and how they might draw from each other but neither attains a higher position.

By Pratiti, Undergraduate Class of 2020