Artists in South Asia and beyond continue to find contemporary relevance in the possibilities offered by the miniature tradition: its capacity to tell multiple narratives; to challenge Western hierarchies of materials and techniques; to explore the intimacy of encounter; and its propensity to combine conceptual strategies with exquisite craft skills.
That many of the world’s greatest collections of South Asian miniature paintings and manuscripts are held in Britain also raises questions of culture and power in the entangled histories of empire and globalisation. These histories are reflected in the hierarchies of museum collections and art school curriculums. What would it mean if JMW Turner’s best paintings were in the museum stores of Lahore and New Delhi?
These five works offer windows into the vast and interconnected worlds the exhibition unfolds.
The delivery of presents for Prince Dara Shikoh’s wedding, c1640
A man in a blue tunic stares out to meet the viewer’s gaze in a self-conscious address; pointedly pushing against the direction of the crowd of gift-bearers. Amid all the gilded splendour of the bridal bounty, it is easy to miss the splatter of turmeric on his clothes (and on the white turbans of many of his fellows): the messy traces of pre-wedding haldi (turmeric) ceremonies.
This is one half of a double-page illustration from the Padshahnamah, or the Book of Emperors, a manuscript commissioned by Shah Jahan (the Emperor of the World) and formerly in the Mughal imperial library. Thanks to its usage as the catalogue cover for an exhibition in 1997, and the Royal Collection Trust making high resolution images of these paintings digitally accessible; it is one of the most frequently referenced paintings in the works of contemporary artists in South Asia.
Head of an Elephant, c1700-1710
‘Indian draftsmen must surely be among the absolute masters of enclosing a weighty form between two simple lines, leaving the spectator to fill in what lies between,’ noted the painter Howard Hodgkin, himself a celebrated collector of South Asian miniatures.
This fragmentary drawing shows a bull elephant in mast, a state of intoxication triggered by a period of peak testosterone levels, which also induce the dark secretion oozing from his crescent-shaped temporal gland. The elephant’s wide-open eye, swimming in a whirlpool of fine lines, hints at the frantic energy that made elephant-fighting a popular combat sport in the courts of Rajasthan – where this was drawn.
A Rajput Sardar, c1914–15
This striking watercolour by Samuel Fyzee-Rahamin (1880–1964), with its virtuosic rendering of its subject’s extraordinary facial hair, its precise outline brushwork of his pyjamas’ gathering folds by his ankles and its delicate wash of colour, gives clues about a few facets of its maker’s unusual artistic journey.
Born into a Jewish family in Poona, Fyzee-Rahamin was one of the first Indian students at London’s Royal Academy Schools, where he trained with John Singer Sargent. On his return to India in 1908, he abandoned oil painting to adopt techniques from miniature painting. This willingness to forsake convention was mirrored in his personal life: he converted to Islam to marry the remarkable writer and cultural figure Atiya Fyzee (the first South Asian woman to attend Cambridge University) in 1912, the couple taking each other’s family names to become ‘Fyzee-Rahamin’. He showed widely and internationally, including at the British Empire Exhibition in Wembley in 1924, before settling in Pakistan after its creation in 1947.
A Lover Waiting For His Beloved, 1999
Imran Qureshi’s modest-sized painting captures the artist’s relationship – teetering on the knife-edge between deference and contestation – with multiple traditions of miniature painting. The painting’s twin figures, referencing the legendary lovers Radha and Krishna, are rendered in the Mughal style, but situated in pastoral landscapes associated with the Pahari school of painting. This seeming conservatism of historical reference is punctured by the figure’s distinctly urban attire, and with the painting’s borders collaged from second-hand Urdu books rather than formal calligraphy. On the top and bottom right corners, Qureshi even invites us to consider his test strokes of white paint on paper as part of the composition.
Did you come here to find history?, 2009
In this nearly nine-metre-long digital print, originally commissioned for a collateral project of the 53rd Venice Biennale, Qureshi superimposes faces sourced from her own passport photographs, a 19th-century photograph of an Indian acrobat, and portraits from Mughal miniatures and by Venetian painters. The faces are aligned at the eyes; the images are appropriated and transformed, obscuring, magnifying and refuting their original meaning. The work, that we are encouraged to walk on either side of and see through, invites us to view history as a collection of overlapping fragments constantly rearranged to construct new narratives.
‘Beyond the Page: South Asia Miniature Painting and Britain, 1600 to Now’ runs at The Box (theboxplymouth.com) from 17 February - 2 June 2024
