Esoteric and exoteric vision in South Asian miniature painting

Abstract

This essay focuses on contemporary artworks that hark back to Mughal examples. In particular, there is an underlying formal arrangement shared by traditional and contemporary art, which I would like to suggest has much in common with reading maps. In fact, many of these artworks actually feature maps that alert us to different ways of ‘reading’ this tradition of formalism, stimulating different levels of description.

Keywords:

• cartography
• Mughal painting
• contemporary painting
• intermediality
• formal and semiotic analyses

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Dr. Sophia Powers, the University of Auckland, for reading an earlier draft and offering helpful comments and suggestions.

Notes

1 See also Ramaswamy 2007. Koch (2012) emphasises that the manipulation of maps and their depiction in these Mughal allegorical paintings had a political purpose to emphasise imperial worldly power and possessions, literally to show the extent of imperial reach. These interpretations complement the cosmological dimensions that I detail in this essay.

2 She writes, ‘the Mughal emperor’ was master of both worlds – widely interpreted as ‘the temporal’ or ‘the visible’ (‘alam-i-suri) and ‘the spiritual’ (‘alam-i-ma’navi), (2007, 774).

3 In many Safavid and Mughal paintings, dark grey areas, shown as rivers or the sea, were originally silver – now oxidised. One can only imagine what this gleaming silver would have added in terms of visual effect.

4 Abū l-Faḍl writes about the ‘transmuting glance’ of the Emperor Akbar, who was supposed to have changed one of his painter's work from ‘outer form’ to ‘inner meaning’ (Abū l-Faḍl 1948, 298). For a study of this characterisation of the Mughal emperors in the literature see Franke 2014.

5 Irina O. Rajewsky writes that intermediality is ‘a generic term for all those phenomena that (as indicated by the prefix inter) in some way take place between media’ (2005, 46). For further studies on this topic, see Rippl 2015.

6 See, for example, Smith-Spark 2004.

7 For an in-depth study of this topic, see Bürgel 1988.

8 The artist grew up in the Punjab as part of the Ahmadiyya sect. Its founding leader, Mirza Ghulam Ahmad (1835–1908), stated objectives using the language of ẓāhir and bāṭin: to ‘bring about peace and manifest the Divine verities that have become hidden from the eyes of the world’ (https://www.reviewofreligions.org/10547/the-purpose-of-the-advent-of-the-promised-messiah-2/). The artist states that miniature painting ‘allows the artist to access certain tools, symbols, and vocabulary,’ that are part of the Indo-Persian tradition: ‘[f]or example, some sacred animals and imaginary symbols (like the loin, goat, halo behind the emperor, or symbol of Shiva) are all symbols found within South Asia’ (https://www.patheos.com/blogs/altmuslim/2006/10/the_imagery_of_clowns/).

9 For a study of this topic, see Del Bonta 1999.

10 Wasim's Cricket Match (2005) makes a direct reference to Jahangir's Dream by enclosing a likeness of the painting at the centre of the work. The globe below is turned into a cricket pitch over which float India and Pakistan armed to the teeth with their nuclear arsenals pointed at each other.

11 For further information on study in Lahore and for an analysis of contemporary artists using the Mughal idiom, see Whiles 2010.

12 Apart from the use of the cypress found in Persian and Mughal painting, it is clear that the artist is aware of the esoteric Indo-Persian art. In an interview, the artist stated that

miniature painting technique itself is [a] very meditating experience. When I sit in a specific posture to paint, and start rendering a small area with thousands of tiny strokes, it seems like I’m in a trance. When you produce work from that trance, the work is spiritual. (http://www.artnowpakistan.com/talha-rathore/)

13 Quoted in Aamir and Pervaiz (2018, 10). The authors also quote Ḥāfeẓ-e Shīrāzī, and other poets, who associate the cypress with the straightness of direction, spiritual height, and moral uprightness.

14 For more information on this work, see Ayad Akhtar, who wrote ‘Breath of Miraj’ to accompany the art: https://www.shahziasikander.com/artworks/shahzia-sikander-portrait-of-the-artist-2016-one-in-a-suite-of-four-etchings-with-accompanying-collaborative-text-breath-of-miraj-by-ayad-akhtar-published-by-pace-editions-inc#5.

15 For an exploration of how the line of control has continued to provoke or inspire contemporary artists’ artworks, see Dadi and Nasar 2012. The book does not deal with the influence of Mughal composition on such works. Another artist who uses maps is Gulam Mohammed Sheikh (see Parsons 2014). Although the artist does not continue the Mughal formal principles examined in this essay, he uses early modern European mappae mundi, he does inhabit these maps with Mughal figures and details. As such, Parsons suggests the artist's maps offer postcolonial possibilities: ‘productive interactions, in which the European map is reconfigured to offer a pluralist vision that is not nationally or ethnically bound’ (2014, 192).

16 Silent Night (2017) consists of eleven rubbings of a coin that features the phrase ‘Allahu Akbar’ (‘god is great’) in a vertical line. The pun is that Akbar (‘great’) also refers to the coins struck by the Emperor Akbar during the Dīn-i Ilāhī, or Divine Faith, the syncretic religion he formulated in 1582, to synthesise aspects of various major religions, with him as head.

17 The curtain features in a well-known story by the poet Niẓāmī Ganjavī, where Iskandar (Alexander the Great) judges the artists of Europe and China. On one wall, the Europeans paint their picture; on the other side of the room, the Chinese polish the wall to a mirror-like finish to reflect the European work. Iskandar orders a curtain to be drawn over the European image so that the Chinese reflection vanishes. This probably has its origins in the ancient topos of the painting competition between the legendary painter Zeuxis and Parrhasius. The latter presented a painting of a curtain, which was so realistic it fooled Zeuxis into trying to draw the curtain to see the painting.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Gregory Minissale

Gregory Minissale is Associate Professor of contemporary art and theory at the University of Auckland, and he has been the lead investigator on several art-science projects on eye tracking and art, mental health and art, and politico-aesthetics. He works across the analytical and continental divide in analysing art and visual cultures. He specialises in empirical aesthetics and philosophical approaches to art, and is the author of Rhythm in Art, Psychology and New Materialism (2021) and The Psychology of Contemporary Art (2013).