| Modern intolerance aside, Verma claims his book is aimed at correcting the imbalance as most earlier books on Mughal art are mere "exhibition catalogues". It is grossly unfair to dismiss research so glibly, given the exhaustive 25-page bibliography and approximately 33 pages of notes and references at the end of the chapters that suggest a wealth of reading and research material through which the author has waded to arrive at his own treatise. The remark, therefore, seems directed more towards the scarcity of colour illustrations in Verma's own book, showing the publisher to be out of sync with the times in terms of quality (poor) and resources (niggardly) for a book on paintings. |
| That aside, Verma's book walks the tightrope between lay reader and scholar masterfully ""sufficiently simple to appeal to the one and reasonably informed to please the other. "A study of the Mughal tradition of painting is all the more relevant as it shows the continuity of various traits of classical Indian art, namely Ajanta art and the later Indian schools, namely the Pala (Buddhist or Eastern India school) and the Gujarat schools (Jain or the Western India school)," he writes. At its zenith, the Mughal atelier "opened new vistas of painting for future generations". "Akbar," he notes, "rescued painting from religious dominance, on the one hand, and disapproval, on the other." |
| The Mughal school that developed through the dominant rulers of the dynasty can, at least in part, be attributed not just to court patronage but to the descriptive eye of the rulers themselves whose own memoirs are exhaustive ("...he was of middle height, but inclining to be tall," writes Jahangir in one instance; "he was of the hue of wheat; his eyes and eye-brows were black, and his complexion rather dark than fair; he was lion-bodied, with a broad chest, and his hands and arms were long..."). No wonder Mughal paintings tend to be as accurate in matters of pictorial reference as written documents from the period. |
| Verma gets into the skin of the painter rather than the cloak of the art critic, and it is this that sets the book apart. He begins with a description of the atelier to which the painters flocked during Akbar's reign (but greatly diminished in number in the time of Jahangir and Shah Jahan, giving rise to a sub-imperial Mughal school as painters left to seek their fortunes elsewhere). |
| In order to study Mughal art, the modern scholar would turn to its most distinctive highlights""the narrative form (which the artist achieved by viewing a composition "from a certain elevation" so "various groups and figures appear as isolated units" "through a zigzag placement"); portraiture ("with a marked tenor of realism"); natural history (based on "accuracy in the delineation of the physical features" and a "naturalistic treatment" that, says the author, "was only a continuation of Indian tradition and not an imitation of the West"); and margin-painting, often sumptuous, of which art-historian Percy Brown says "no miniature was considered complete unless it was surrounded by a highly ornamented border". |
| An important chapter is entirely devoted to ascriptions and attributions that have been neglected for most part by modern researchers. Often, works were forged, or signed by others, and inscriptions by either the artist himself, or by the patron, which deal with the subject and convey its historicity, have too long been ignored. It is this that could form the subject of an entire new book""but only if OUP would loosen its purse strings to spend on better paper and reproductions for a fully illustrated volume. PAINTING THE MUGHAL EXPERIENCE |
| Som Prakash Verma Oxford University Press Price: Rs 2,250; Pages: 185 |
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