Re: How To Become A Murgal
Marciano Deschamps
Babur's languages were Turki, in which he wrote his memoirs, and Persian, the language of culture across Iran and Central Asia. His reign lasted only four years, but during that time he constructed new buildings and laid out gardens in the geometric Iranian style. None have survived.
At his death in 1530, his kingdom incorporated the major cities of Kabul, Lahore, Agra and Delhi, but his control remained fragile. Babur was succeeded by his son, Humayun, who lacked his father's determination and military brilliance. Within ten years, Humayun was forced out of Hindustan by the Afghan Sher Shah Suri, who took over Mughal territory and ruled from Delhi. His kingdom was short-lived, but he instituted an extremely effective administrative system that was his lasting legacy.
Humayun fled with a small band of followers to take refuge in Iran at the court of Shah Tahmasp. With the Shah's help, he was able to return to Kabul, from where he eventually launched a successful attack on Delhi. Humayun regained his former territories after nearly 17 years, but died only months later after falling down the stone steps of his library at night. He was succeeded in 1556 by his remarkable 13-year-old son, Akbar.
Some independent kingdoms were conquered; other rulers signed treaties and entered imperial service. Over the next 49 years Akbar extended Mughal rule over most of the north of the subcontinent, stretching from Gujarat in the west to Bengal in the east, and from Kabul and Kashmir in the north to the borders of the independent Deccan sultanates in the south. As new kingdoms were conquered, artists and craftsmen from many different regions entered the royal workshops. They brought their own distinctive styles to the monuments, paintings and artefacts being created for Akbar.
The population of the empire was predominantly Hindu, with a significant Muslim minority, and Hindus reached the highest levels of the administrative hierarchy. Akbar married some of the daughters of Hindu Rajput rulers.
In the royal House of Books (Ketabkhana), which housed the library as well as being the place where manuscripts were created, Hindustani artists were directed by two Iranian masters formerly in the service of his father, to produce a new style of book painting. Many of the calligraphers, bookbinders and illuminators who worked with them were also Iranian.
These popular tales of the Muslim hero Hamza and his band of followers fighting against unbelievers, witches and demons, and supernatural or magical forces, were traditionally performed, rather than written down and read. However, Akbar ordered one of the court's most accomplished prose writers, another Iranian from the large city of Qazvin, to produce a written version that was then copied by calligraphers for this imperial volume. Slightly contradictory contemporary sources record that the tales filled 12 or 14 bound volumes, each with 100 paintings, and that the work took 15 years to complete. The exact years are not specified, but most authorities now agree that they fell between about 1562 and 1577.
Fewer than 200 of these paintings have survived, all of them separated from their bindings which have long disappeared. The largest group of 60 folios is now in the MAK (Museum fr angewandte Kunst) in Vienna. The second largest group, comprising 28 complete folios and two fragments, is in the V&A.
Each of the large folios of the Hamzanama is made up of multiple layers. The text is written on paper, burnished and lightly flecked with gold and backed with cotton; the painting is done on cotton which is backed with paper. The layers were then glued together, and originally had borders, of which small remnants now remain.
The Hamzanama paintings demonstrate the beginning of a distinctively Mughal style that would become more refined as Akbar's reign progressed. Parallel trends simultaneously took place in architecture, and in the production of artefacts for the court.
The vertical format of the Hamzanama paintings, high-viewpoint and meticulous details of the surface ornamentation of some weapons and textiles, all derive from Iranian conventions, but are combined with a naturalism in the depiction of animals and birds that belong to Hindustani traditions.
The nascent Mughal style continued to evolve over the next decades as the artists were exposed to new influences, or new recruits joined them. Iranian artists sought employment at Akbar's court, bringing with them an enhanced attention to detail and sophisticated use of colour. They were vastly outnumbered by the calligraphers, craftsmen, architects, poets and scholars who also came from Iran, able to move easily into this Persian-speaking milieu.
In 1578 Persian, already the language of the cultivated elite, was officially adopted as the administrative language of the empire. This allowed reports to be collected in the central Record Office of the court from every province, each of which had many local languages.
A few years earlier, in 1574, a Translation Bureau (Maktabkhana) had been established as one of the major court institutions. It produced Persian translations of key texts, the most important of which were then illustrated.
By the late 16th century, few at court were able to understand Turki, the language in which Babur had written. The Persian translation, the Baburnama (Book of Babur), introduced to a wide Mughal audience the account of his turbulent life before and after invading Hindustan. He gave detailed descriptions of the unfamiliar flora and fauna he came across, and recorded in forthright terms how much he disliked many aspects of the land, notably its climate and architecture. He also described many of the new gardens he laid out in the Iranian manner, and the plants he introduced from Central Asia.
The translation of Babur's memoirs from Turki to Persian was supervised by one of the great intellectuals of the age, Akbar's friend 'Abd al-Rahim, who also held the highest office in the empire. [....] The translation was finished in 1589, and several illustrated copies were made.
One manuscript dating to about 1590 reached the Western art market in the early 20th century, and its paintings were sold off separately in 1913: 20 folios were bought that year by the V&A, and at least 50 others are known in collections across the world.
Akbar's reign was shaped by his curiosity regarding religions other than his own Muslim faith on the one hand, and his desire for religious tolerance on the other. Acutely aware of tensions between his Hindu and Muslim subjects, he wanted the major Sanskrit texts to be translated into Persian so that they could be widely read by non-Hindus. In doing so, the hoped that "those who display hostility may refrain from doing so and may seek after the truth". The Translation Bureau was therefore given the task of producing Persian versions of fundamental texts such as the Ramayana (Razmnama, or Book of War) and the Harivamsa, considered to be an appendix to the Mahabharata, detailing the life of Krishna.
The translation of the Sanskrit text of the Harivamsa into Persian was finished by about 1590 and paintings were added. One imperial copy had its paintings removed in the early 1920s when stray pages appeared on the Western art market. The six folios in the V&A were part of this group, but were not acquired until 1970 when they were bequeathed by Dame Ada Macnaghten.
As these translations were nearing completion, Akbar gave the order for the history of his reign to be compiled, including an account of his real and mythical antecedents. The author was Abu'l Fazl, the great polymath of the age, who began his work in 1590 and completed most of it by 1596. His rigorously researched history drew on the central record office of the empire, a number of memoirs commissioned by the emperor from witnesses to recent events, and the recently-translated memoirs of Babur. Though always historically accurate, Abu'l Fazl also portrayed Akbar as the ideal monarch within Iranian traditions of kingship, and the perfect man within traditions of mystical Sufism.
In 1572, Akbar embarked on a military campaign to conquer the independent sultanate of Gujarat. The region was extremely wealthy, with sophisticated craft traditions and enormous textile production. The pilgrim port of Surat, from where Muslim pilgrims set off from all over the subcontinent to perform the Hajj, was also within its borders. Victory came to the Mughal forces early in 1573, and Akbar's procession through Surat is depicted in the Akbarnama.
One of the paintings from the Harivamsa, showing the dramatic combat between the gods Indra and Krishna taking place above a boat sailing past a rocky landscape, is also obviously inspired by European art.
Other paintings were created for copies of the translation into Persian of the Life of Christ that had been requested by Akbar, and were written by Xavier in collaboration with a scholar at the Mughal court.
A jewelled gold spoon exemplifies the uniquely Hindustani goldsmith's technique of kundan which is still widely practised today across the subcontinent to set stones in gold. It is mentioned by Abu'l Fazl in the Ain-e Akbari, but has antecedents that predate the arrival of the Mughuls by centuries.
A dagger of watered steel, which was originally overlaid with gold, shows the close relationship that must have existed between the artist/designers in the royal workshops and the craftsmen who made objects like this. The chiselled details of a tiger attacking an elephant whose rider, or mahout, tries to fight it off on one side of the blade; and the combat between a horse and an elephant directed by their respective riders on the other, relate to similar scenes in paintings done at the end of Akbar's reign.
By this time, specialist craftsmen in the provinces of the empire supplied the court, and exported their wares to Europe. Gujarat was famous for its inlaid wooden boxes and cabinets, and for its artefacts made out of thin pieces of mother of pearl. Their intended market determined the design of the finished piece, and often its form. Therefore, items made for the huge market in Portuguese Goa might include European-style ewers and salvers that, from there, often travelled westwards and were sometimes given European silver or gilt silver mounts.
7fc3f7cf58