The global Mughals

The historian Marshall Hodgson once claimed that if a visitor from Mars landed on earth in the 16th century, they may have well thought that “the world was on the verge of becoming Muslim”. Hodgson did much to correct tired orientalist stereotypes that had limited the history of Islam to the Arab world or some bygone Golden Age, focusing his attention instead on what he called the three great “Gunpowder Empires” of early modernity: the Ottomans, the Safavids, and the Mughals. Their strong political institutions, commercial vitality, and culture of patronage meant that these three Muslim polities were not only central to world history but, Hodgson would argue, progenitors of global modernity as well.

A new exhibition at London’s Victoria & Albert (V&A) Museum offers a similar claim: if a visitor from Mars landed in India in the 16th or 17th centuries, they may well have thought they were at the centre of the world. ‘The Great Mughals: Art, Architecture, and Opulence’ at the V&A highlights “the great age of Mughal art” through the successive reigns of three of its most important emperors: Akbar, Jahangir and Shah Jahan. We learn that the art and design that flourished under them — not unlike their political culture — drew from a range of disparate contexts and traditions, absorbing and transforming not only the aesthetic landscape of the subcontinent, but that of Europe and Asia as well.

At the Mughal court, artists from Europe were trained by Hindustani painters. Jesuit missionaries, Iranian calligraphers and bookbinders, and Indian craftsmen, both Hindu and Muslim, all contributed to the making of a new kind of material culture. A Jesuit Father taught Portuguese and elements of Christianity to the young prince Murad. The emperor Akbar, who was illiterate, commissioned large, illustrated volumes of the ‘Hamzanama’ from the royal workshops. Formally, the latter brought together Persianate high-perspective and a painterly emphasis on meticulous detail with Hindustani naturalism in the depiction of animals and birds. The exhibition demonstrates how this synthesis formed the basis of a distinct aesthetic that would go on to characterise the visual culture of north India and beyond for centuries.

This impact was by no means limited to painting, nor was it confined to the court. Gujarat, which was the richest province in the empire, was also a global centre for the production of mother-of-pearl. The iridescent inner shell of sea snail from the Indian Ocean was deftly cut and polished to decorate caskets, gameboards, tableware, furniture, and even armour. One of the most striking objects at the exhibition is the Bargello shield, made of wicker and black lac inlaid with mother-of-pearl and gold, and lined with velvet. The shield, which depicts emblems of Mughal royalty like the parasol alongside scenes from the court and the hunt, is an example of how luxurious items made in Gujarat’s workshops ended up, often via Goa, across the world: this one belonged to the Medici family and may have been sent to Italy as a gift from the Safavid ruler Shah Abbas.

Motifs from one artistic genre like painting ended up informing others as well, demonstrating just how broad the cultural impact of the Mughals was. The image of the mythical winged Simurgh clutching an elephant — an allegory of conquest — is repeated in line drawings and on a wooden altar made in Gujarat for the Portuguese around the same time. Similarly, scenes of the hunt, especially those of antagonistic animals fighting and killing, reappear across imperial paintings, embroidered robes and woven carpets. Such depictions of imperial violence would, however, eventually give way to illustrations of sovereign peace. One example is the exhibition’s iconic title image, a painting by Bichtir from around 1628. It places Shah Jahan atop a globe, flanked by an ewe and a lion, two creatures usually portrayed at each other’s throats. This particular motif recalls earlier variations deployed under both Akbar and Jahangir, which used Elizabethan forms like the lamb and the lion to convey broader notions of kingship and sovereignty. These animals “inhabit a world of perfect harmony”, writes the curator Susan Stronge in her catalogue essay, “in which natural enemies cease to exist under the emperor’s divinely ordained just rule”.

‘The Great Mughals’ rightfully puts the Mughals at the centre of their world, showing that while they may not have been a maritime power like the British or indeed the Portuguese before them, they were nevertheless global in every sense of the term. The tragic irony of this historical corrective is that it has occurred alongside a simultaneous disavowing of the Mughals in the present by the three nation-states in which they left a material legacy: India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. In recent years, the Mughal inheritance has either been repressed or actively denied, no doubt because it cuts across the borders of the subcontinent and reminds its citizens of a shared past violently cleaved apart in 1947. This, of course, was not always the case: the Mughals once provided an important point of departure for many nationalists and political thinkers, and for some even embodied the subcontinent’s chief contribution to world heritage itself.

Today, however, the situation has changed: the global elevation of the Mughals has depended upon their disowning at a local level. Neither India nor Pakistan — the two countries home to the bulk of the Mughals’ material and cultural legacy today — were formally involved with the exhibition. It also did not include or even reference any of the several contemporary artists working in the broad artistic tradition inaugurated by the Mughals, a gesture now commonplace in exhibitions of this sort. A visual response from artists like Shahzia Sikander or Imran Qureshi, both of whom have taken the “miniature” form to new heights, would have demonstrated how the cultural influence of the Mughals didn’t stop with Aurangzeb. Apart from soliciting a few individual donors from the subcontinent or its diaspora and including a single, stunning video on contemporary restoration efforts at Humayun’s tomb, there was little done by the Museum to connect past to present.

This was, however, probably not for lack of trying, given that many nation-states tend to eagerly approach exhibitions in metropolitan centres like London or New York as an important part of their diplomacy or soft power. The current ‘Silk Roads’ exhibition at the British Museum, for example, is supported in part by the Government of Uzbekistan. ‘The Great Mughals’, meanwhile, was bankrolled by Qatar’s Al Thani Collection. Hodgson would not be impressed.

(The exhibition is on view until May 5)

— The writer is a historian of modern Islam and the Indian Ocean world at King’s College London