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Nearly
everyone knows — everyone who is interested in this field, that is — about the great work associated with Mughal ateliers that flourished under emperor Akbar (1556-1605): all those extraordinary illustrated manuscripts, the Hamzanama, the Akbarnama, the Baburnama, the Anwar-i Suhaili, the Jog Bashisht, the Tawarikh-i Khandan-i Timuriya, the Ramayana, the Razmnama, to name some. And all those countless dispersed album leaves and moving portraits. One has only to read Abu’l Fazl in his Ain-i-Akbari to learn how passionately fond “His Majesty” was of painting, and how sedulously he nurtured it, picking up painters from all over the country and placing them under the tutelage of great ustads who headed the imperial studios. While savouring all this, however, one almost forgets about where he got his great taste in painting from. Undoubtedly, it would be clear if one looks at things keenly enough — from his father, Humayun. In the context of Indian history, Humayun remains an almost peripheral figure that simply fills the gap of time between his father, Babur, and his son, the great Akbar: someone who, as the ringing but unfair phrase has it, “tumbled through life and tumbled out of it”. But in the history of Indian painting, he needs to occupy a secure place, for it was he who, during his period of virtual exile from India in Persia, established contacts with some great painters active at that court, and was instrumental in their following him to India when time was opportune for him to return. The documentation is somewhat thin, but firm, on this point. Evolution of Mughal-style
In the late 1546 or early 1547, we learn from Bayazid Bayat, who wrote his Tazkira of Humayun and knew many things first hand, the exiled emperor sent from Kabul, through the Persian ambassador, two farmans to Iran. “In one, he sent for the painters Mir Sayyid Ali and Mulla ‘Abd al-Samad”, clearly asking them to join him at Kabul. The two painters “set out the moment they got the farman”, and travelled to Kabul. They were escorted by men so instructed by Humayun, for the roads were not safe. But when they arrived at Kabul — Mir Sayyid Ali, Mulla ‘Abd-al Samad, and a third, Mulla Fakhr — they “humbly presented themselves before His Majesty, who honoured them with many favours.” Much of what followed is known. The first two of the above-mentioned — Mir Sayyid Ali and Mulla (sometimes called Khwaja) ‘Abd al-Samad — became the two great ustads, who went on to head the imperial ateliers under Akbar. What they brought with them was the exquisite refinement for which Persian painting was renowned; and when to it were added the vigour of the elements of ‘native’ styles — Rajput or pre-Mughal — in general, which the Indian painters who joined the imperial studios brought to their task, what is called the ‘Mughal style’ of painting, in general, was born. This may be a somewhat rough and over-simplified reconstruction of how things developed but it is not far from the way things took shape in Akbar’s India. Two great masters As far as Persian refinement is concerned, something that the two great Ustads were masters of, consider this passage from a copy of the letter which Humayun wrote in 1553 to his friend, Nawab Rashid Khan of Kashghar in Central Asia: a letter to which Bayazid himself drew attention in his Tazkira. With the letter, he says, were sent royal gifts, of which Humayun gave some details while taking pride in the skills of his painters. “Another (of the gifted artist with us) is the painter Maulana ‘Abd-al-Samad, the unique of the time (farid al-dahr), the shirin qalam (sweet pen), who has surpassed his contemporaries. He has made on a grain of rice a large field on which a group is playing polo — two posts at one end and two at the other — with seven players on the field and behind them a rank of footmen who hand out mallets and in the middle of the field a chob-i qabaq….” All on a grain of rice. The same refinement, that wonderful attention to detail — so ‘profoundly Persian’ as a critic called it — is seen in several others of Abd al-Samad’s works, including his painting of the Fighting Camels which he turned out when he was 85-year-old. And, of course, in the painting. which is reproduced here: Akbar presenting a painting to his father Humayun. It is a tour de force, a marvel. While numerous figures are seen moving in and out, music is being played, platters of food being carried, the young prince, a painting in his hands, sits in a tree house with his father to whom the painting is being offered. It almost passes belief but the work that Akbar has painted is an almost exact version of the whole of Abd al-Samad’s painting: a painting within a painting. Different in temper but of the same exquisite workmanship is another painting, generally referred to as Humayun and his brothers in a landscape. It is a work by another of Humayun’s painters: the maverick, Dust Muhammad. In a garden filled with craggy rocks, in some of which forms of animals of all shapes and sizes seem to be hidden, a party is evidently in progress. Royal women with their maids going about their work occupy the upper half of the page but in the lower half, there is a superb gathering of men: dressed in sumptuous finery, and wearing the headgear that he invented himself — the taj-i ‘izzat — Humayun sits, receiving a painting from the hands of a man, who remains unidentified, but a painter perhaps. Other men are seen scattered: personal attendants, grooms of horses, even some other painters perhaps. There is a dream-like air of refinement that hangs above the entire scene. Scholars keep debating what the scene represents, but no one has questioned its delicacy of execution. Sadly, neither of these paintings is in India now. Abd al-Samad’s work is in the Gulshan Album in Teheran, and Dust Muhammad’s is part of the Jahangir album in Berlin.
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Humayun and his painters
