Deccani art
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History
The Times of India, May 17 2015
Writer-historian William Dalrymple looks at how cosmopolitan free thinking inspired artistic brilliance
Just as the Mughals dominated early modern India politically, controlling all the rich lands from Kandahar down to the Vindhyas, so until recently they have also dominated the work of both modern historians and scholars of art history: for every book on Vijayanagara or the Deccan sultanates, there are one hundred on the Mughals; for every book on Bijapur or Hyderabad, there is a shelf on Delhi and Agra. As a result, the extraordinary renaissance of the arts in the 16th century Deccan in the sultanates of Bijapur, Bidar, Ahmadnagar and Golconda is only now beginning to receive the attention it deserves. But in the last few years several remarkable new books, four major scholarly conferences and two large exhibitions --one of which opened in National Museum in Delhi in January -have begun to fill this lacuna. All this has recently culminated in a landmark show at the Metropolitan Museum in New York, entitled Sultans of Deccan India 1500-1700: Opulence and Fantasy , brilliantly curated by Delhi-born Navina Haidar.
The highlight of the Met exhibition is unquestionably the room full of Deccani miniature paintings with their luminous palette of rich, jewel-like colours, their sense of make-believe and illusion, their enigmatic shifts of scale and their brilliantly innovative use of marbling orabri, `clouds in the wind'. The show also includes a spectacular collection of masterworks in bronze, silver, stone, glass, lacquer, and fabrics painted or dyed into phantasmagorical patterns.Seeing these objects collected together en masse for the first time, it is now possible to grasp just how richly eclectic and heart-breakingly beautiful much of Deccani art once was.
The Deccan courts were the most cosmopolitan in South Asia, where Persianate Shia culture was cross-fertilised with the very different but astonishingly rich Hindu artistic traditions of southern India, dominated by the great Hinduruled Kingdom of Vijayanagara. The art historian Mark Zebrowski, who laid the foundations for the recent interest with his 1983 volume, Deccani Art, argued that this rich mix produced art unlike that found anywhere else: “Whereas Mughal painting clearly illuminates the world through realistically observed detail, Deccani painting presents us with a civilisation seen through the charmed mirror of poetry...Paintings pulsate with restless lines and riotous colours... aiming to establish a gently lyrical atmosphere, often one of quiet abandon to the joys of love, music, poetry or just the perfume of a flower. Moods are established through fantastic colours. We are admitted into a private world of feeling. Reflection and reverie triumph over dramatic action.“
As the works in the Met show demonstrate, while Ahmadnagar and Golconda both produced extraordinary artwork, it is Bijapur that is rightly admired as the most refined and innovative of the Deccani sultanates. The archetypal Bijapur ruler was Sultan Ibrahim Adil Shah II of Bijapur, an erudite scholar, lute player, poet, singer, calligrapher, chess master and an aesthete. Under Ibrahim Bijapur underwent a remarkable renaissance. Though his first love was perhaps music (and his most popular composition a book of Urdu songs) Ibrahim oversaw the creation of a remarkable literary revival and attracted to his court the greatest poets and writers of his day, including Zuhuri, the Persian poet laureate.
Ibrahim had changed the name of his capital from Vijayapur, City of Victory to Vidyapur, City of Learning. According to the chronicler Rafiuddin Shirazi, during his reign the libraries of Bijapur swelled with painted manuscripts as Ibrahim had “a great inclination towards the study of literature and he had procured many books connected with every kind of knowledge. Nearly sixty men, calligraphers, gilders, book binders and illuminators were busy doing their work the whole day in the library.“
The artists, writers and craftsmen who worked for Ibrahim were drawn from a wide variety of different backgrounds and religions, and crossed the divide, both between Sunni and Shia, and Hindu and Muslim. For Ibrahim did share one very important quality with his Mughal contemporary Akbar: his fondness for, and interest in, Hinduism.Early in his reign Ibrahim gave up wearing jewels and adopted instead the rudraksha rosary of the Hindu sadhu. He visited both Shaivite temples and the monasteries of the Nath yogis, and knew Sanskrit better than Persian. According to Zebrowski, “it is hard to label him either a Muslim or a Hindu; rather he had an aesthete's admiration for the beauty of both cultures.“
In his songs Ibrahim uses highly Sanskritized language to shower equal praise upon Sarasvati, Hindu Goddess of learning, the Prophet Muhammed and the Sufi saint Gesudaraz of Gulbarga.In the 56th song, this Muslim Sultan more or less describes himself as a Hindu God: “He is robed in saffron coloured dress, his teeth are black, the nails are red... and he loves all. Ibrahim whose father is God Ganesh, whose mother is Sarasvati, has a rosary of crystal round his neck... and an elephant as his vehicle.“ Ibrahim's preferred Sanskrit title was Jagatguru, “World Teacher.“
Bringing together Hindu and Muslim in an atmosphere of heterodox learning, and uniting Persians, Africans and Europeans in a cosmopolitan artistic meritocracy, Ibrahim presided over a free-thinking court in which art was a defining passion. This open-minded attitude to Hinduism is particularly visible in matters of music, which Ibrahim learned from Hindu musicians who migrated to Bijapur after the fall of Vijayanagara. Ibrahim's Bijapur seems to have played a central role in the development of Indian musical theory, and especially in the classification and delineation of different ragas, or musical modes. There is about the art of Bijapur something so dreamy and refined that it often feels somehow too rarefied to survive the real world. A kingdom so obsessed with the arts could only be hopelessly vulnerable to more worldly and militaristic forces. This is not just a modern perception.Jacques de Coutre (c1575-1627), a Flemish jewel merchant from Bruges who visited Bijapur five times between 1604 and 1619, quotes Ibrahim as saying, “Why would I want to make war on the Great Mughal? I would rather offer him money as a gift, and keep him content, and be his friend, and remain in my house in peace and quiet.“
Ibrahim continued throughout his reign to ply the Mughals with presents, sending embassy after embassy with precious jewels to keep them at bay: one scholar has even suggested that the absence of jewels in portraits of Ibrahim might be to prevent the Mughals asking for them as presents.
The Mughals took and sacked Ahmadnagar in 1636, and thereafter they made it clear that they did not recog nise the sovereignty of the two remaining Deccan sultanates Golconda and Bijapur. At the same time, rumours of the heterodoxy of Bijapur spread; and the city came to be seen by the Sunni Mughals as a hot bed of Shia heresy . The ultraOrthodox Aurangzeb, appalled by the city's reputation, finally marched on the city and besieged it in 1685. The city held out for eighteen months, before Ibrahim's great grandson finally handed over the keys in 1686, and its libraries were looted.
Under Navina Haidar' inspired curation, the Metropolitan Museum show has almost miraculously succeeded in bringing back together the contents of collections scattered and dispersed for 400 years. It is the best chance we are ever likely to get to assess anew the forgotten wonders of this forgotten moment of cosmopolitan free-thinking and inspired artistic brilliance.