Courtly life out of India

India is the most complex and elusive of the three great epicentres of human civilisation.

Detail from a folio from a Bhagavata Purana: Yashoda nursing the child Krishna (c. 1525–50).

Of the three great epicentres of human civilisation, the Mediterranean, China and India, the last is the most complex and elusive. This is partly because its history is so long and its cultures and ethnicities so diverse, but also because it has never been effectively unified except during the period of the British Raj; and since the British left in 1947, the subcontinent has been divided once again, for the first time and fatally, along religious lines.

One of the strengths of India has always been its cultural and spiritual pluralism, its proliferation of religions and philosophies living side by side in mutual tolerance. The idea of a state dominated by one religion, especially one that is, like Islam, exclusive and absolutist in its nature, was a disastrous mistake because it aligned political power with religious dogma. The contrast between the prosperity of India and the misery, instability and corruption of Pakistan is an object lesson in the superiority of tolerance over bigotry.

Civilisation began in India 4500 to 5000 years ago with the Indus Valley culture, contemporary with those of ancient Egypt and ­Sumeria and of the Yellow River and Yangtze in China. These early civilisations seem to have been disrupted by several centuries of drought, possibly aggravated by farming practices, in the early second millennium BC. Such crises ­always provoke population movements and this episode brought the Indo-Aryans into the subcontinent.

A lady playing with a child (late 17th century).

These were the people who formed what we know as Indian civilisation, with the Vedas, the oldest literary works in the Indo-European tradition, as well as the later Upanishads, which fall roughly into the period from the age of Homer to that of the Roman Empire. Meanwhile, religious and philosophical systems, ­including non-theistic ones, flourished; Hinduism developed with its many variants, and new systems of belief such as Buddhism arose to ­address problems inherent in Hindu thought.

Politically, the history of the region is just as complex. Parts of India were incorporated into the Persian Empire and then into that of Alexander, in both cases creating important avenues for East-West exchange. It was in the Greco-­Indian kingdom of Gandhara, for example, that Buddha was first represented in human form, subsequently migrating all the way to China, Japan and Southeast Asia.

A musical mode, Bilawal Ragini (c.1670).

Most of the area was unified, immediately after Alexander’s time, by Chandragupta ­Maurya, who was known to the Greeks as Sandrokottos and is said to have seen Alexander in his youth. After Chandragupta, the greatest monarch of the Mauryan Empire (322BC to 185BC) was Ashoka, who helped to promote and disseminate Buddhism. Other dynasties followed, ruling over parts of India, of which the most ­important was perhaps the Gupta dynasty (third century to AD590), roughly contemporary with the Sassanians in Persia. This period from the end of the Mauryan Empire to the first Islamic conquests in the 13th century is considered the golden age of Indian civilisation.

Islam, founded by the Prophet Mohammed (c. AD570 to AD632), had spread rapidly in the middle and later seventh century, occupying large parts of the Byzantine Empire, and in 651 conquering the Persian Sassanian dynasty, exhausted by a recent and mutually costly war with the Byzantines. This conflict, which seems so far in time and place from the culture with which we are familiar, is in fact the subject of Piero della Francesca’s fresco of the Battle of Heraclius and Khosrow in his cycle of The Story of the True Cross in Arezzo (c. 1452 to 66).

The Persians did not at once abandon Zoroastrianism for Islam — some indeed moved to India to maintain their beliefs and became the Parsis — but gradually, under the Abbasid caliphate, which was based in Baghdad and strongly influenced by Persian culture, they converted to the new religion, although they ­resisted the hegemony of Arabic imposed throughout the western Islamic world. By the 11th century, meanwhile, the whole of the eastern Islamic world was dominated by the Turkish Seljuks, rapidly converted to Persian culture and presenting themselves as the protectors of the caliph in Baghdad. This state of affairs lasted until the Mongol invasions destroyed the Seljuks and Baghdad and devastated Persia in the 13th century.

Maharana Sangram Singh II and his son at a Shiva shrine (c.1715).

Islamic Turks invaded India in the early 13th century and ruled a large part of the subcontinent as the Delhi sultanate. The founder of the dynasty, Qutb al-Din Aibak, was raised in the Persian city of Nishapur, where Omar Khay­yam had lived a century earlier. This dynasty ­resisted the Mongol onslaught but was supplanted in 1526 by the Mughal Empire, ruled by Timurids — that is, Persianised descendants of Tamerlane (1336 to 1405).

Thus by the time of the European Renaissance, Persian-Islamic culture, including the use of the Persian language, stretched from ­Anatolia to India. The Mughal Empire was ­initially tolerant and did not seek to impose Islam by force; consequently, the Islamic imperial government coexisted with regional monarchies, known as Rajput states, which ­retained their Hindu beliefs and traditions, ­although they were influenced to varying degrees by the culture from the West.

This is the period to which the miniatures in this exhibition belong, predominantly from the 18th century and many, thanks to an important Felton Bequest acquisition of 270 works in 1980, from the region of Mewar in the south and central part of Rajasthan.

The style of Rajput painting is to varying ­extent influenced by, yet ultimately distinct from, that of Mughal painting: the style produced for the imperial court was a highly ­refined one brought from Persia and, initially at least, executed by Persian artists. The exhibition includes an example from about 1600, Akbar ­Receiving Gifts from His Ministers. The style is ­extremely refined, richly but subtly decorative, full of fine details, with modelled figures and even some attempt at perspective, although spatial depth is still translated into a vertical ­arrangement of one line of figures above the other, as in a pre-Renaissance painter such as Duccio in Siena.

This illumination is contrasted with an ear­lier Indian one from the Bhagavata Purana of Krishna being nursed by his foster mother, Yashoda (c. 1525 to 50). Here the colours are intense and saturated, and both the building and the figures are absolutely flat. The figures, especially those of the women, are rounded as in earlier painting and sculpture, and the eyes, very big and wide open, are seen frontally even when the figures are in profile.

In the mature Rajput courtly style, these two traditions merge to some extent: the Ind­ians borrow the refinement and careful draughtsmanship of the Mughal tradition as well as decorative details such as floral backgrounds, as we see most impressively in the very fine Maharaja Jaswant Singh of Jodhpur Listening to Music (c. 1660), where not only the figures but the architectural setting and landscape are highly sophisticated, and even the design of the garden reflects Persian tradition.

Not all the other images are as refined as this; many are simpler in style, brighter in colour, with larger and more schematic Indian features. And they cover a range of material, from relig­ious and literary subjects to scenes of everyday life at the Rajput courts. As far as the former are concerned, there are numerous ­images of Krishna, the avatar of Vishnu — in one case spying on a group of bathing girls — as well as several images of women adoring the aniconic phallic manifestation of Shiva.

Among literary subjects is one whose roots are in the Old Testament but which we owe in this form to the 15th-century Persian Sufi and poet Jami. In this version, Potiphar’s wife’s ­attempted seduction of Joseph and then her false accusation of rape, as originally told in Genesis, turns into the love story of Yusuf and Zulaikha, in which the temptress is at last ­redeemed by faith and love.

Another very popular story was the ancient legend of Laila and Majnun, best known as the subject of a popular poem by Nizami, a Persian poet of the 12th century. It is a tale of desperate but tragic love in which the wishes of the young couple are thwarted by the girl’s family, who forces her to marry another. The favourite scene for illustration is the visit of Laila to Majnun, by now an emaciated figure, half-maddened by passion, dwelling in the wilderness and surrounded by wild animals like Orpheus in Western art.

Each of the three versions of this scene is charming in its own way but one also includes the practical details of how Laila found her former lover in the desert, and how she is to get home again: a camel, bearing a tented palanquin, kneels in the foreground with its driver. The same concern for the practicalities is notable even in a scene of devotion such as Maharana Sangram Singh II and His Son at a Shiva Shrine (c. 1715), where porters and other attendants wait with a litter in the foreground; one is even holding the water pipe he will enjoy on the way home.

As we see elsewhere, princes would smoke while riding elephants and even while bathing in a pool in the garden, once again with an ­attendant to hold the pipe out of the water. And in fact most of the pictures in this exhibition are ­either portraits of princes, whether sitting, standing or on horseback, and scenes of court life, in which the princes appear, distinguished from the crowd of figures by a halo or nimbus, presiding over court ceremonies, hunting or taking part in some other entertainment.

A great many images come from the state of Mewar, already mentioned. This was the Hindu kingdom that held out the longest against the rule of the Mughals, and finally came to a settlement with the new power on more favourable terms than those that had capitulated first, as we learn in the handsome catalogue that accompanies the exhibition.

No sooner had the warlike ruler of Mewar made peace with the invaders, however, than he and his successors decided to devote themselves to the pursuit of pleasure in their new and palatial capital city of Udaipur. Accordingly, the exhibition offers a remarkably vivid impression of the sumptuous and extravagant life of India’s princely courts, especially in the very large spectacle pictures with their aerial views of palaces in which perspective sometimes goes wildly awry.

The most beautiful works, however, remain the smaller pictures, such as the exquisite A Lady Playing with a Child (late 17th century), painted in the subtler Mughal style, or the much more overtly Indian A Musical Mode, Bilawal Ragini (c. 1670), with its warmer palette, Magritte-like impossible mirror reflection, and its main figure almost writhing in longing for her absent lover. But there are further layers of symbolism for those who care to look deeper, and this image is at the same time the evocation of a classical mode of Indian music.

Visions of Paradise

National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, until April 28.