Indian Painting under the Mughals, A.D. 1550 to A.D. 1750 c13.32

c13.32

Although Mahmud’s account confines itself mainly to the intrinsic, rather than the artistic, value of his spoil, as would be expected from such a bigot, it is not difficult to see that the India of his time was a veritable museum of fine and applied art. That painting existed on the walls of the magnificent buildings thus described, and that it did not escape the desecrating hand of the iconoclast, may also be inferred. As an illustration of Muslim feeling on this point a later episode may be cited. In the fourteenth century Firoz Shah Tughlaq, one of the most enlightened and tolerant of Muhammadan rulers in Hindustan, showed a marked antipathy to the painting of the Hindus. While he encouraged them in architecture, as buildings erected during his reign amply testify, he deliberately destroyed their painting, because in this form of art ‘figures and especially pagan saints’ predominated. It is more than probable that those of Mahmud’s time met the same fate. There is considerable literary evidence to show that the kind of painting obliterated by Firoz Shah was very common all over India, pictures of the Hindu pantheon being painted on the walls of most of the sacred buildings, particularly at the time immediately preceding the founding of the Mughal empire. Niccolò Conti, a Venetian traveller who visited India in the early part of the fifteenth century, specially notes that all over the country he found temples the interiors of which were painted with figures of different kinds. But it was left to the Persian mission of Shah Rukh, previously mentioned, to describe definitely this aspect of Indian temple decoration. The leading member of the party was an educated and observant Persian of the name of ‘Abd ur-Razzaq, whose investigations took him over parts of southern India from the year 1442 to 1444. He was much impressed by the lavish display of pictorial art in all the religious edifices he visited, and remarks on those at the temple of Belur as follows: ‘So great a number of pictures and figures have been drawn by the pen and pencil, that it would be impossible, in the space of a month, to sketch it all upon damask or taffeta. From the bottom of the building to the top there is not a hand’s breadth to be found uncovered with paintings’, adding that ‘all the other buildings, great and small, are covered with paintings and sculptures of extreme delicacy’. Further, with regard to the style of this work, he states rather vaguely that it was executed ‘after the manner of the Franks (Europeans) and the people of Khata (China)’.¹ It would be interesting to know what ‘Abd ur-Razzaq actually meant by this criticism. That there was something strangely occidental in these paintings is proved by an ingenuous commentary on the Persian’s description in the account of an incident which took place about fifty years after his visit. When the first Portuguese expedition to reach India landed in 1498, Vasco-da Gama and his men, concluding all the inhabitants save the Muhammadans were Christians, actually worshipped in a Hindu temple near Calicut, though it is true some of the party ‘thought the frescoes of the saints rather unusual’.²