Mughal Court Research Articles

CONTRIBUTION OF ROYAL MUGHAL LADIES IN THE FIELD OF ART AND ARCHITECTURE FROM 1526-1707 A.D: A BRIEF SURVEY

Indian woman since ancient days had played an important role in the socio-cultural and philosophical development of the country. Especially in Medieval India, the royal ladies of the Mughal court were almost as remarkable as their male counterparts. Royal Mughal ladies like Hamida Banu Begam, Haji Begam, Nurjahan Begam, Jahanara Begam, Roshanara Begam, Zeb-un-Nisa Begum etc. not only played a dominant role in contemporary politics but also contributed a lot to artistic field. The present article is an attempt to highlight the contribution of Royal Mughal ladies especially in Artistic field.

The Third Jesuit Mission to the Mughal Court: Father Jerome Xavier’s Mirʾāt Al-Quds (Mirror of Holiness)

The Third Jesuit Mission to the Mughal Court: Father Jerome Xavier’s Mirʾāt Al-Quds (Mirror of Holiness)

Culture of Encounters: Sanskrit at the Mughal Court, written by Audrey Truschke

Culture of Encounters: Sanskrit at the Mughal Court, written by Audrey Truschke

Portraiture in Indian Miniature Paintings

The art of miniature painting in India traces its origin to the Buddhist manuscript Illustrations of the Pala period in Nepal and Eastern part of India in the 8th to 11th century. The Jain manuscripts in Gujrat and Rajasthan, as early as 11th century, also point towards a practice of such illustrations. These manuscripts, apart from portraying religious literature, also covered wide ranging topics such as medicine, astrology, etc. They were profusely illustrated, and were mostly inscribed on palm leaves. Apart from serving as important treatises, they were widely used as gifts during royal marriages and accessions. However, the Mughal Rule in India brought a certain degree of sophistication, refinement and finesse to this form of art. Under successive Mughal Rulers, the art of miniature painting reached its zenith. While Babur and Humayun, who were great lovers of art and literature, could not build proper ateliers during their reigns due to their frequent military campaigns and conflicts, they were responsible for bringing to India two versatile artists, Abdus Samad and Mir Sayed Ali from the Safavid Persian Court-whose works would have significant impact on the art of miniature paintings in the Mughal Courts. Humayun’s successors Akbar, Jahangir and Shah Jahan built some of the most significant ateliers under their rules, and some of the preeminent miniature artists like Basavan, Manohar, Bichitar, Ustad Mansur, Balchand and Murad flourished under their patronage. Some very significant works like Baburnama, Akbarnama, Razamnama, etc. were also commissioned by the early Mughal Emperors. With the decline of the Mughal Empire, the miniature painting scene shifted to the Rajput Courts in Rajasthan and the Hill States in Northern India. Various important Schools of painting –like the Mewar, Marwar, Jaipur, Hadoti, Kangra, Basholi, and Garhwal – Schools, to name a few, started flourishing under their respective rulers. While the Mughal influence still prevailed, yet each school had its own distinctive characteristic and feature. The subjects of these paintings and manuscripts ranged from religious literature, court scenes, royal processions, flora and fauna, textiles, jewelry to elaborate equestrian and hunting scenes. However, the most riveting and captivating depictions were in the form of elaborate and brilliant portraits of the rulers, their nobles and courtiers, which not only throw light on their magnificent reigns, but also open a window to the culture, tradition and practices of those times. This essay makes an attempt to study the fine art of portraiture in miniature paintings in the various Mughal, Provincial and Rajput Courts to bring out their historical and cultural significance.

Institutions of Change: Kathak dance from Courts to Classrooms

This paper is a study of the progress of Kathak from the erstwhile courtesan culture to the contemporary classroom, structured practice. It aims to highlight the works of contributors like Nirmala Joshi and Sumitra Charat Ram as the pioneers of institutional Kathak that completely divorced its cultural past in the Mughal courts. Amidst all this cleansisng of Kathak history, Madame Menaka, one of the first female Kathak dancers to perform on the proscenium stage and to legitimise her presence by her association with insitutions of Kathak stands out. Madame Menaka truly deserves more attention in dance history and this paper aims to celebrate her life and works in Kathak. These artists and art entrepreneurs have never come together on the same platform for their contributions in the field of art and culture as they do in this paper. Their works lie scattered in biographies and articles that perform a discrete study on each of them. This paper is therefore an attempt to draw a linear development of Kathak through the works of female art contributors.

The Promises and Perils of Courtly Poetry: The Case of Mir ʿAbd al-Jalil Bilgrami (1660-1725) in the Late Mughal Empire

Abstract This article examines the career and writings of the minor poet ʿAbd al-Jalil Bilgrami (1660-1725) in order to explore the relation between the practice of courtly poetry and the work of politics in the Late Mughal empire. Tracing the transformations in ʿAbd al-Jalil’s writings over the first decades of the eighteenth century, this article demonstrates that the poet’s practice, driven as much by literary concerns as by material needs, responded to and was implicated within the politics of the Mughal court. His life thus illuminates both the opportunities and dangers opened by the practice of poetry in an era of the rapid and unprecedented dispersal of political authority in the empire.

Sharafat and Bhal Mānsī: a new perspective on respectability in Fasana-e Azad

ABSTRACTIn the late nineteenth century, the definition of sharafat, or respectability, went through great change. This essay explores these changes through Fasana-e Azad (1878–1883), an early Urdu novel. Fasana-e Azad expanded the vocabulary of sharafat, using words like bhal mānsī (the quality of being a good person) to lift respectability above religious categories. Respectability was no longer to be associated with family background, or the Islamicate culture of the Mughal court. Rather, civility and proper behaviour and actions were to be its basis. Through its protagonist Azad, Fasana-e Azad proposed a reformed sharafat, defined in distinction to old elites and the lower classes. Its heroine Husn Ara represented a model of the new sharif woman, an educated, independent, autonomous thinker who exercised remarkable agency for her time. Fasana-e Azad attempted to secularize sharafat, offering a new vision of respectability in the context of social mobility and change in colonial South Asia.

Audrey Truschke. Culture of Encounters: Sanskrit at the Mughal Court.

Audrey Truschke. Culture of Encounters: Sanskrit at the Mughal Court.

The Dynamics of a Mughal Court Festival

The celebration of Nauroz, being one of the most well-defined events of the Mughal Court, finds ample space in their records. Yet, its story was not just about grandeur and magnificence, but touches several aspects of what made and sustained the empire. Building on the multiple identities of the festival, which emerges from a brief overview of its antecedents, this article examines the ways in which the sources have presented each of the emperors to have negotiated with it. However, it is on stringing them together and noting the changing nature of references that the layers begin to reveal themselves, discerning not only what the sources voiced but also may have attempted to suppress, in our endeavour to understand the cultural functioning and articulation of power in the Mughal Empire.

Conceptualising the past of the Muslim community in the sixteenth century: A prosopographical study of the Ak̲h̲bār al-Ak̲h̲yār

This article studies a sixteenth-century sufi taz̠kirāt (biographical dictionary), Ak̲h̲bār al-Ak̲h̲yār written by ‘Abd al-Haqq Muhaddis Dehlawi (1551–1642), an ‘ālim (scholar), who was also a sufi. The text is frequently cited as the earliest, most comprehensive and reliable biographical compilation of South Asian sufis and ‘ulamā’ (learned men in religious sciences) from the thirteenth to the sixteenth century. Indeed ‘Abd al-Haqq is best remembered for his scholasticism as a mūḥaddis̤ (a person well-versed in Prophetic traditions) which is also supposed to have made him into a rather staid scholar of Sufism. But what of him in his own society of elite Muslim intellectuals in the early seventeenth century? ‘Abd al-Haqq was networked into the elite circles of the Mughal court, but he stayed away from Mughal patronage, communicating his ambivalence regarding its political experiments by espousing alternative paradigms. My article studies the structure of the Ak̲h̲bār al-Ak̲h̲yār to comprehend how a Muslim intellectual constructed a history of his peer group at a critical juncture in the making of Mughal authority. My article follows a prosopographical methodology to explore the innovative structure of the Ak̲h̲bār al-Ak̲h̲yār and its complex projection of the past of the piety-minded in Hindustan. As I argue, the Ak̲h̲bār al-Ak̲h̲yār is a carefully structured, remarkable history of sufis and their networks, providing them with contexts and significance that questioned both, inherited paradigms of moral authority present in the fourteenth- and fifteenth-century sufi texts as well as those emerging in the statist renditions of the past from the courts of the Mughal emperors Akbar and Jahangir.

Thomas Roe and the Two Courts of Emperor Jahangir and King James

En tant qu’ambassadeur de Jacques I er à la cour de l’empereur Jahangir, Thomas Roe devait, dans sa correspondance à destination de l’Angleterre, prendre en compte deux ensembles de lecteurs : les administrateurs de l’East India Company, et un public royal et aristocratique choisi. La forme de sa correspondance varie en conséquence ; ses descriptions détaillées de la cour moghole, de ses pratiques, de ses lois et de son administration, ciblent le second groupe de lecteurs. Roe cherche à définir l’Inde moghole par une série d’attributs diamétralement opposés à ceux de l’Angleterre jacobéenne, et par extension de l’Europe. En un sens, son journal impliquait aussi un portrait de l’Angleterre pour ses lecteurs anglais. Si la plupart des critiques voient dans les dichotomies de Roe l’indice d’une perception typiquement occidentale et inadéquate à une véritable compréhension de l’Orient, le présent article suggère au contraire que les efforts de Roe pour définir l’Inde par opposition à l’Occident impliquent une oblitération délibérée de leurs similitudes sur bien des points. De plus, l’image du théâtre qu’il emploie régulièrement afin de critiquer l’irréalité de la cour moghole tend à saper son entreprise de différentiation, dans la mesure où elle possédait une résonance singulière dans le contexte anglais.

Edward Terry’s A Voyage to East-India (1655): A Chaplain’s Narrative of the Mughal World

La présentation détaillée de l’Inde que donna le chapelain anglican Edward Terry dans la version révisée et étoffée de son Voyage to East-India publiée en 1655, a souvent été mal perçue par la critique. La tendance de l’auteur à se perdre en commentaires religieux de nature digressive a pu rebuter certains lecteurs, et les détourner des informations historiques pourtant utiles sur le pays et la cour de l’empereur Moghol Jahangir (1569-1627). Cet article démontre que, loin de barrer l’accès au récit, ces passages interpolés constituent un élément formel caractéristique de celui-ci. C’est en effet dans ces récits insérés que se dessine la vision morale de l’auteur. La signification à la fois spirituelle et morale du voyage jaillit du commentaire, notamment des moments de glose où l’auteur donne sens à ses observations et à ses expériences. Le texte est en outre très élaboré sur le plan littéraire, en raison non seulement de la sensibilité religieuse de l’auteur, mais aussi de l’art qu’il déploie dans ses portraits de personnages – des analyses très vivantes des Européens vivant alors en Inde, dans des conditions assez précaires. Cet article tente de mettre en valeur ces aspects jusque-là négligés du texte de Terry, en s’attachant à la question des genres littéraires et des finalités religieuses du texte.

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Review of 'Culture of Encounters: Sanskrit at the Mughal Court'

Review of 'Culture of Encounters: Sanskrit at the Mughal Court'

Religion, the ‘riot’ of 1807 in Delhi, and anti-Company sentiment

The East India Company’s occupation of Delhi in 1803 created a new situation at the seat of the Mughal court, where the citizens had to treat with an alien government and its native instruments though formally they were still subjects of the Mughal emperor seated in the Red Fort. It is this situation, not so much any religious or communal issue, which explains the riot of 1807 directed against Harsukh Rai, a banker and major agent of the Company.

Restoration of the Thag Baba Shrine in Kashmir: A Forgotten Mughal Tomb for an Intoxicated Sufi Saint

Abstract The shrine of Thag Baba was constructed in the seventeenth century by the Mughals in their frontier province of Kashmir. Built for a Sufi saint whose history is lost in legends, this lone surviving Mughal tomb in Kashmir, divorced from local building traditions, represents the imperial decorative techniques of the Mughal court and served as a symbol of royal authority. Examining the history of the shrine and its possible patronage, this article traces its evolution and the reasons behind its decay following completion. It examines how issues of conservation and consolidation of the building were addressed with an aim to promote renewed community involvement and development. Highlighting the project as an exemplar, the article reflects on contemporary issues and challenges adversely affecting Kashmir’s built heritage and on how these might be addressed.

The Genesis of Persian and Urdu Languages and Literatures in India

The Indian subcontinent has contained a vast array of ethnicities, cultures, traditions and languages since the beginning of civilisation. While classical Indian civilisation was based on Sanskrit, the sacerdotal language of the Brahmins, this sacred language did not affect the general mass of people, nor literature beyond a privileged elite. The first true lingua franca that transcended caste barriers to a certain extent was Persian, which was adopted by the ruling dynasties of Muslim India (who themselves were generally Turks or indigenous Indians rather than Persians), their Hindu peers, as well as the civil servants. However, from the beginning of the seventeenth century Urdu began to form around the lower echelons of society as a pidgin common tongue to enable communication between the myriad ethnicities of the Mughal Empire, ultimately restricting Persian to a refined language of culture and courtly life in the Mughal court and becoming a vibrant and dynamic language in its own right, thus becoming the first literary language with a substantial original contribution from Indians since ancient Sanskrit. This article charts the adoption of Persian and later the emergence of Urdu as spoken and literary languages in the Indian subcontinent using original sources in those languages.

India-Iran Relations

India and Asian country have continually shared deep social, cultural, economic and political connections and relations that have enriched each civilization. The utilization of the Persian language at the Mughal courts is simply one example of Iranian cultural influence in north Bharat.

Metamorphosis at the Mughal Court

This essay examines the appearance of a German automaton of the Roman Goddess atop a stag in a seventeenth-century Mughal painting of the Emperor Jahangir (1569-1627) receiving the Safavid Shah 'Abbas I (1571-1629). It asks what relationship is constructed in the painting between this automaton and a figure who presents it. And what can this painting tell us about the function and value of the Diana Automaton beyond its point of origin in northern Europe? In addition to presenting instances of European automata that travelled to India in the early modern period, this essay also reconsiders the recommendation that we understand objects that crossed cultural borders as hybrid, and it shows that the inclusion of the Diana Automaton in the painting suggests a more robust metaphor for thinking about and describing transcultural objects.

The Unlikely Commentator: The Hermeneutic Reception of Śańkara’s Thought in the Interpretive Scholarship of Dārā Shukøh

The varieties of interreligious dialogue that Professor Leonard Swidler has advocated and practiced for the last several decades are not by any means novel initiatives; they have been occurring for millennia in many different parts of the world. Whether found in the comparisons between Roman and Vedic deities in the sixth book of Cesar's Gallic Wars, the transmission of Buddhism from South to East Asia, or modern meetings of the Parliament of World Religions, spiritual traditions have persistently sought ways to explore and encounter one another's ideas and ethical commitments. Of course, such encounters are never easy and, in fact, are often perilous. The sometimes complicated motives, hermeneutic complexities, dangers of misunderstanding, and possibly resultant mutual acrimony between traditions that can result from dialogue are formidable. But, the rewards of such encounters can also be unforeseen and offer lasting legacies and potential promise. One of the most dramatic illustrations of such dangers and rewards can be found in the creative interpretive attempt by the seventeenth-century Mughal prince Dara Shukoh to see ancient Hindu texts the first historical revelations of Islam. The legend, established for centuries now, has it that the justification for the humiliating execution of Prince Dara Shukoh by his brother Aurungzeb in 1659 was Dara's heresy. Of all his works dealing with the relation of brahminical and Islamic thought, we are told by contemporary sources that his original work, Majma'-ul Bahrain, and his translation of the Sirr-i Akbar were what provoked the charge. (1) Indeed, after the public punishment was carried out in the streets of Delhi, when the decapitated head of Dara was brought to his younger brother inside of a box, the new Shah is reported to have uttered the eulogy: as I did not look at this infidel's face during his lifetime, 1 have no wish to do so now.(2) Of course, the fate of Dara a historical matter is much more attributable to his political and military misjudgment, having spent seven years thwarting the expansion campaigns of Aurungzeb and ineptly contesting his forces in the final battle for dynastic succession. (3) However, the return of orthodox Islam to the Mughal court was to be the major legitimization for Aurungzeb's rule, and so the perpetuation of the legend has made Dara appear to his centuries of detractors a decadent apostate in his great-grandfather Akbar's tradition--and to his supporters a tragic martyr for Hindu-Islamic concord in Indian civilization. It is quite ironic then that, far we know, Dara had a much more hermeneutically self-conscious appraisal of his own scholarship, one that combined his personal spiritual interests with a desire to vindicate the universality of the qur'anic worldview through a demonstration of how its monotheism was echoed in classical brahminical religious and philosophical texts. Though this agenda inspired him to see to the translations of sacred Vedic scriptures and practices into the then-open intellectual world of the empire, it also made him their unlikely commentator. This can be gleaned most clearly from Dara's supervision of the translation of some fifty Upanisads during a six-month period in 1657, the Sirr-i Akbar. (4) Dara was a Qadiri Sufi, admittedly one whose associations with ascetics of other traditions steadily increased during the intellectual ferment that followed Akbar's reign, yet one whose primary audience for these historic translations were members of the Ulema of the imperial court. As such, Dara became a commentator on ancient Sanskrit philosophy, but he was a Muslim commentator who selected and presented texts and concepts for fellow Muslims. This seemingly elementary but very powerful fact is borne out in two pivotal ways. The first lies in the brutally frank reasons he stated in the work's preface, which was argued in the manner of an apologia. Dara did not merely claim that he was offering up a noble example of religious syncretism so that the Islamic and Hindu communities of the empire could aspire to mutual understanding and toleration, but, rather, he set out to defend the Islamic orthodoxy of the Upanisads, even claiming that they were themselves Islamic texts, witnessed by the Qur'an, and bearing witness to true and untarnished monotheism. …