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Fantasies of History in Indian Painting
From the 16th to the19th centuries, artists working for royalty and noblemen in India produced an extraordinary quantity of courtly paintings. Many of these paintings illustrated literary or sacred subjects; but the depiction of contemporary persons and events was an equally important theme.
When scholars consider these paintings of life at court, they look upon them as historical ‘texts’ that will yield information about events and appearances. This presentation will take a somewhat more complex view of the roles served by these paintings in their contemporary context, particularly exploring the relationship between the reality that these paintings depict, and the realities that these paintings create. For if these paintings preserve a record of events that occurred, they equally present a record of events that the patron or painter may have wished had occurred.
Indian ‘history painting’ was initiated under Akbar (r. 1555-1606), the great emperor under whom the Mughal empire gained a firm footing. It has been suggested that Akbari painting concentrated on the here and now as a way of compensating for the new dynasty’s brief history in India. Later, the illustration of the emperor’s life and deeds became de rigeur, with visual chronicles of Jahangir, Shah Jahan and even Aurangzeb’s lives forming major projects of the imperial atelier. When Mughal artists sought to imitate the naturalism of European art, it was no doubt in order to make their records of contemporary life more superbly real. Yet, as the paintings became most believable, they performed their greatest deceptions; the artists under Shah Jahan seem consciously to play with reality effects on the one hand, and alterations of history on the other, as though the painting’s naturalism would compensate for the liberties taken with fact.
The Rajput rulers who came under the Mughals’ cultural sway eagerly adopted the idea of the visual chronicle, but paintings of the Rajput courts offer an even more manifest blend of legend and life. If one the one hand, Rajput rulers are shown rubbing shoulders with their gods, on the other hand, they are shown gaining victories in battles they never fought, or ruling kingdoms they never had. Interestingly, the late Mughals (18th and 19th c) who ruled over a disintegrating empire, seemed to find succour in paintings that showed them as still mighty; these late paintings seem to bring Rajput painterly impulses into the heart of the Mughal court.
Oscillating between historical fact and wish-fulfillment, these paintings of life at court force us to re-examine our ideas of fact, record and truth; visual versus verbal histories; and the relationship of fantasy and history. One might say, in a sense, that the idea of a ‘real’ unbiased history becomes the ultimate fantasy.
Profile:
Kavita Singh is currently Associate Professor at the School of Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. She trained as an art historian at M S University of Baroda (MFA, 1987) and Punjab University, Chandigarh (PhD 1996). She has had a research fellowship at the Victoria and Albert Museum where she did archival work on the history of the Indian collections; a curatorial internship at the Asia Society, New York, and been guest curator at the San Diego Museum of Art, California, for whose Indian painting collection she designed rotations and co-curated a traveling exhibition. She was Research Editor at Marg, one of the major art journals in India. She is currently working a project on the place of museums in the social landscape of India; this project is supported by a collaborative grant from the Getty Foundation. She has published on Sikh art, Indian folk and courtly painting and the history of museums in India. Her teaching and research interests include the history and politics of the museum in India, and issues in Indian painting, particularly of the late Mughal period.