Asian Art Newspaper looks at the history and provenance of the Royal Collection’s Mughal and other Indian paintings, as well as a South Asian works of art, through the exhibition Eastern Encounters
The Royal Collection contains one of the finest groups of South Asian paintings and manuscripts in the world, held in the Royal Library at Windsor Castle. Featuring outstanding examples of the literary and artistic output of historical India, now covered by India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh, the collection includes illuminated manuscripts, depictions of the Mughal court, royal portraits, architectural studies and vibrant illustrations of the Hindu epics, including Mughal and Indian paintings.
Drawing from the wider Royal Collection to source this South Asian exhibition, Eastern Encounters, the show comprises paintings, prints, drawings and photographs to explore the 400-year shared history of the British monarchy and the rulers of South Asia.
The establishment of trade routes to South Asia and the formation of the East India Company (EIC), sanctioned by Elizabeth I in 1600, opened up the possibility of trade with the sub-continent to Britain. While the 17th century was a period of instability for the British monarchy, in South Asia, the Mughal dynasty celebrated a glorious Golden Age. Richer and stronger than any European power, at its height the Mughal Empire ruled over more than 150 million subjects and extended across most of the Indian subcontinent.
This extraordinary splendour of the Mughal court was captured by artists in intricate and detailed paintings and manuscripts. Mughal paintings, which combine influences from Persia, Central Asia, and India, form the core of the current exhibition on a ‘golden legacy’. The works are painted in exquisite detail using brilliantly coloured pigments to depict their subjects and are among the artistic highlights of the Mughal period providing the viewer with an impression of what must have been the great splendour of the Mughal court.
The Padshanama, Chronicle of the King of the World
George III was given a number of these magnificent works, now forming one of the greatest collections of South Asian works on paper outside the sub-continent. In 1798, Lord Teignmouth, Governor-General of India, presented the King with six volumes as gifts from the Nawab of Oudh. Among these was the mid-17th-century manuscript of the Padshahnama (Book of Emperors or Chronicle of the King of the World), an illustrated chronicle commissioned by Shah Jahan as a celebration of his reign and dynasty, which is described by Teignmouth as ‘the most splendid’ Mughal manuscript he ever saw.
This jewel-like imperial Mughal manuscript is amongst the greatest treasures of the Royal Collection and ranks as one of the finest examples of Mughal art and is on show in Eastern Encounters. The volumes form an official record of the first 10 years of the reign of Shah Jahan, the fifth Mughal emperor (and builder of the Taj Mahal). During the 18th century, the manuscript had entered the collection of the Nawabs of Oudh, rulers of Lucknow in eastern India, whose wealth and power quickly eclipsed the declining imperial court.
Shah Jahan (1628-1658) was known as a great patron of the arts and in the early 1630s commissioned the Padshahnama as an illustrated and propagandist account of his reign. Written by the court historian Abd al-Hamid of Lahore, the objective of the text was to proclaim the political and ideological legitimacy of the Emperor’s rule.
The manuscript in the Royal Collection is unique, being the only contemporary illustrated imperial Padshahnama volume to survive. It contains only the first of the three volumes which make up the text. Following a long introduction recounting the Mughal imperial genealogy from Timur to Shah Jahan, the greater part of the manuscript is a discourse on the first decade of the emperor’s rule (1628–38) and ends with an epilogue listing in order of hierarchy the nobles, officials and religious figures who feature in the narrative.
Eastern Encoutners: Mughal Court Artists
The text, compiled from meticulous records of major events was written in Persian, the formal language of the court. This particular manuscript was transcribed by the calligrapher Muhammad-Amin of Mashad in 1657-8. The 44 illustrations and two illuminations were executed by at least 14 of the finest Mughal court artists, amongst them Balchand and his brother Payag, Ramdas Murar, and Bhola.
On a number of occasions these artists have included their own portraits in the scenes, along with those of the principal members of the imperial circle and visitors to court. Sumptuous ceremonies and weddings, scenes of dancing and music, hunts and battles, offer a glimpse of a world of opulent splendour, magnificence and power.
The original sketches for the illustrations in the Padshahnama would, in many cases, have been done from life and incorporated the additional evidence of eyewitness accounts. The drawings were transferred on to a sheet of paper and the vibrant watercolour paints applied over a white translucent ground with tiny brushes. Finally, the whole painting was polished to create a smooth enamel-like surface.
Set amidst beautiful landscapes and the architecture of palaces and forts, the formal composition of many of the illustrations denotes the strict hierarchy of the Mughal court and creates a masterfully controlled rhythm of pattern and colour. Yet it is the artists’ delight in the tiniest details, the texture of lavish fabrics and arrangement of fantastic jewels that gives the pages of the Padshahnama their extraordinary intensity.
The East India Company and Mughal and Indian Paintings
The rise of the East India Company was also reflected in the gifts of manuscripts presented to successive British monarchs on behalf of the EIC and by Company officers. Such works included a Qur’an owned by Tipu Sultan of Mysore with an illuminated frontispiece and gilt-stamped and painted bindings. As one of the personal manuscript Qur’ans of Tipu Sultan of Mysore (1750-99), it was copied by Harun ibn Bayazid al-Bayhaqi and several additions in Persian were made for the Sultan, including tables at the front with information about each Surah. It was originally removed from the Sultan’s palace in 1799 and by 1805 it was traced to Fort William in Calcutta and from there sent to the library at East India House in 1807, finally being presented to George III sometime after this date. This work can also be seen in Eastern Encounters.
During the EIC expansion into India, the Company also needed to document information on the country and commissioned scientific, architectural and botanical drawings from local draughtsmen. One such commission by the then Surveyor-General of the Company, Colin MacKenzie, is a pen and ink drawing, circa 1800, shows a plan of the temple at Srirangam, one of the most important Hindu pilgrimage sites in India.
Following her accession in 1837, Queen Victoria received many illuminated royal letters and gifts of paintings and manuscripts from South Asia. A posthumous portrait of Maharajah Ranjit Singh, the Sikh ruler of the Punjab, circa 1842, was sent to the Queen by his successor, Sher Singh, in an unusual jewel-encrusted gold frame with a letter of belated congratulations on her marriage and the birth of her first son. It is displayed alongside a sketch of his son, Maharaja Duleep Singh, by Queen Victoria. Following the EIC’s annexation of the Punjab in 1849, Duleep Singh moved to England where he became a favourite of the Queen, regularly visiting Osborne House and Windsor Castle.
Queen Victoria’s Mughal and Indian Paintings
In Eastern Encounters, works of art given to to Queen Victoria are also included. Queen Victoria received many books written about or dedicated to her from India, including a volume of her own published journals, The Queen’s Travels in Scotland and Ireland, which was translated into Hindi by the Maharajah of Benares. The Queen recorded the book’s arrival in England: ‘My book, translated into Hindustani, beautifully illuminated, containing a painting of me, by a native artist, receiving the present from the Maharajah of Benares, bound in inlaid marble, is very curious & really beautiful.’ Victoria’s interest in South Asian culture continued throughout her life.
Her studies of the Hindustani language, undertaken in her seventies with her Indian secretary Abdul Karim, are recorded in her Hindustani diaries, which will be displayed in the exhibition with her Hindustani phrasebook. Queen Victoria’s second son Alfred, the Duke of Edinburgh, was the first member of the royal family to visit India in 1869, followed six years later by Albert Edward, Prince of Wales (later King Edward VII), who toured India for four months in 1875-6. This second trip acted as a precursor to the formal declaration of Queen Victoria as Empress of India in 1876. During his tour the Prince was presented with several works of art from the Hindu courts of northern India including a series of vibrant paintings from Jaipur that reproduced verses from the Sanskrit devotional poem Gita Govinda (Song of the Cowherd).
Although King Edward VII never returned to India, he sent his brother and later his son, the future King George V, on royal tours of South Asia. Both the Prince of Wales and his wife, Princess Mary of Teck, fell in love with ‘dear beautiful India’, and, following their initial visit in 1905-6, returned to the sub-continent as Emperor and Empress for a Coronation Tour in 1911–12, the first time that a reigning British monarch had set foot on Indian soil. Their tour was documented in photographs and souvenir books, including albums and scrapbooks compiled by Queen Mary herself in addition to individual photographs mounted together to form a panorama of key moments of the 1911 Durbar, an imperial assemblage, including when King George V formally proclaimed himself Emperor of India.
Queen Mary noted in her diary from the tour of the sub-continent that she ‘was particularly interested in the exquisite drawings by native artists’ that included Mughal and Indian paintings. She acquired numerous South Asian works of art that are on show in Eastern Encounters, including the early 20th-century work Queen Tissarakshita (1911) by Abanindranath Tagore, founder of the Bengal School of Art, as well as several Pahari paintings, including 16 folios illustrating The Story of Prahlada from the Bhagavata Purana, circa 1775-90, from the Nainsukh family workshop.
On show in Eastern Encounters, the Hindu epic, Bhagavata Purana, narrates the stories of the avatars of Vishnu. In the illustrations held in the Royal Collection, the album leaves depict the demon king Hiranyakashipu turning against his son Prahlada for his devotion to Vishnu, Hiranyakashipu’s enemy, who killed his brother while in his boar incarnation, Varaha. The god Brahma grants Hiranyakashipu a wish that he cannot be killed by any human or animal, neither inside nor outside, neither during the day nor at night. Vishnu does eventually kill him in his Naramsimha (Narsingh), half-man half-lion avatar on the threshold of his palace at twilight.
Although few Pahari artists signed their works, certain styles can be associated with family workshops. Best known among these is the family workshop of the early 18th-century artist Pandit Seu and his two sons, Manaku and Nainsukh. Nainsukh’s four sons and two nephews were also all painters and it is this generation to which this series of paintings is attributed.
After the death of King George V in 1936, Queen Mary presented a number of her South Asian works of art, including Mughal and Indian paintings, to the Victoria & Albert Museum and a selection of her Indian books, photographs and archival material to the India Office Library (now held in The British Library). Many of the finest pieces in her collection remained in the Royal Library, part of a collection of books, manuscripts and paintings spanning a period of over 400 years and representing the great artistic traditions of the subcontinent.
Eastern Encounters: Four Centuries of Paintings and Manuscripts from the Indian Subcontinent, was due to open on 3 April and run until 13 September at the Queen’s Gallery, Palace of Holyrood House, Edinburgh, Royal Collections, rct.uk. The Queen’s Gallery is currently shut due to Covid-19. We will update this article when we have new opening dates for the exhibition.
