Indian Painting under the Mughals, A.D. 1550 to A.D. 1750 c11.17

Language: English

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Fortunately, as the list of public and private collections at the end of this volume shows, there is ample material for such study, and the wide distribution of the examples, regrettable in one way, has also its compensations. From a variety of causes, some of which will be referred to, a very large number of the finest Indian miniatures has, in the course of time, entirely disappeared. Sufficient have survived, however, to enable us to judge of the art at its best. But it must be admitted that the mass of the material which is now known to us is of a decidedly inferior order, for even the larger collections of Indian pictures as a rule only contain a very few specimens of outstanding merit. Miniatures of a good quality are usually productions of an early date, and are rare because, owing to the passage of a longer period of time since they were executed, they have been liable to more vicissitudes, and accordingly most of their kind have perished. Later, when the art had degenerated and passed into the hands of an increasing number of less skilful craftsmen, the bazaars of Northern India were flooded with quantities of ‘commercial’ paintings, which became very common, and, it should be noted, form the bulk of our present-day collections. Out of these it is necessary to select the few fine examples which enable us to form a correct conception of the subject.

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The history of some of these pictures, especially of the older and better ones, since the gradual breaking up of the imperial collection of the Mughals has often been a sequence of adventures. Some still exhibit distinct traces of the careless treatment to which they have been subjected, of being rolled up in a sepoy’s bedding together with other ‘loot’, of exposure and rough travel, of monsoon rains, of the relentless attacks of tropical insects, of many years of neglect, before they have again found their way into safe keeping. The marvel is that any of these delicate paintings have survived after the period of indescribable lawlessness and disorder that ensued in Northern India in the eighteenth century. When the Persian monarch, Nadir Shah, sacked Delhi in the year 1739, the first real inroad was made on the imperial library of Mughal manuscripts and miniatures, for the conqueror carried away to Teheran with the rest of his vast treasure a selection of the most valuable of these works of art. Some, bearing the seals of Jahangir and Shah Jahan, as well as evidences of a temporary sojourn in Persia, and later in Constantinople, have found homes in Paris, Berlin, Petrograd, and Vienna. During the war of the Rohillas, more than thirty years after the Persian’s devastations, much damage to the collections of art at the Mughal capital took place;

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and later, the Marathas, while in Delhi, obtained by some means groups of pictures which they sent to the Deccan to be appropriated by the Rajas of Satara and the Peshwas of Poona. But the final dispersal of the contents of the library and picture gallery brought together with such care by the Mughal emperors took place during the mutiny of 1857, when irresponsible people of all kinds, obtaining access to the royal palace, helped themselves to anything that had an appearance of value. Many folios of pictures perished as a result of the interval of anarchy that ensued; but on the other hand not a few were rescued by the intercession of more cultivated minds. Several ardent bibliophiles and picture-lovers obtained for nominal sums priceless illustrated manuscripts—the offer of a rupee to every sepoy who produced one of these is said to have formed the nucleus of at least one well-known modern collection—but the imperial library of the Mughals, and all the works of art that it contained, ceased to exist from this date. Fragments of it are now scattered all over the world, but even if these by some miraculous means could again be brought together, they would only form a fraction of the magnificent collection of pictorial art that was for over two centuries the pride of the Mughals.