Babur, Akbar, and the Transformation of Gwalior's Rock-Hewn Tirthankaras

Abstract

During his 1528 sojourn in Gwalior, the first Mughal emperor, Babur (r. 1526–1530), encountered numerous colossal Digambara Jain Tirthankaras fashioned from outcrops in the Urvai valley. He recounts in his memoirs how he ordered the naked “idols” destroyed. While this famed episode of iconoclasm in the Bāburnāma is well known to scholars, three paintings portraying Babur's trip to Gwalior that survive from the multiple illustrated manuscripts commissioned by Babur's grandson Akbar (r. 1556–1605) have eluded close examination. This article probes the divergent representational strategies employed by the artists of those folios tasked with depicting the same scene. I demonstrate how one artist pictorially transformed Gwalior's rock-hewn Tirthankaras into animate idols, another alluded to yet elided their portrayal, and a third bypassed entirely the thorny issue of their representation. I argue that those illustrations constitute a visual emendation to Babur's memoirs that effectively exonerated Babur from any charge of desecrating inert Jain icons—an act by then incongruous with Akbar's policy of ṣulḥ-i kull and the strong Mughal-Jain relations at his court. This proposition is further supported by an original translation of an excerpt from Siddhicandra's (d. ca. 1666) Bhānucandragaṇicarita, a Sanskrit text composed by a Jain monk at the Mughal court. Ultimately, this study contributes to critical discourses on iconoclasm, artistic agency, Mughal-Jain relations, and historical memory by exploring the theoretical issues concerning the depiction of rock carvings and idols in the pictorial afterlife of Babur's encounter with Gwalior's rock-hewn Tirthankaras.