Indian Painting under the Mughals, A.D. 1550 to A.D. 1750 c16.30

c16.30

Shah Jahan was deposed by his third son Aurangzeb in the year 1658, a little more than a century after Akbar had ascended the throne. These hundred years, extending from the middle of the sixteenth century to the middle of the seventeenth century, cover the whole period during which the Mughal school of painting was a living art. From now begins the story of its decay. To Aurangzeb’s unsympathetic policy the decline of the Mughal empire has been ascribed, and to his puritanical personality the death of the painter’s art is attributed. It is, however, probably more accurate to say that his mistaken ideals and want of statesmanlike insight brought the empire to its ruin, which in its fall brought with it all the organizations, social, intellectual, and political, built up with so much care and knowledge by his predecessors. And among those institutions which collapsed with the dynasty was the Mughal school of painting. We have seen that this art had already begun to show the effects of the period of excessive luxury which marked the reign of Shah Jahan. It is possible that at this stage the degeneration might have been stayed, or the life of the school at least prolonged for another span, by the action of a vigorous ruler to whom the painters’ art appealed. Unfortunately the reverse has to be recorded. Its vitality was still further sapped by the antipathy with which it was regarded by his successor Aurangzeb, an attitude which was brought about by the new ruler’s strict observance of the letter of the Muhammadan creed. Unlike his father and grandfather whose mothers were Rājputs, Aurangzeb was the son of a Muhammadan queen, Arjuman Begum, the lady of the Taj. Probably on this account he maintained with unswerving rigidity the tenets of his faith, and also showed less toleration towards the beliefs of others. Tavernier, who knew him personally, remarks that he ‘ especially shows great zeal for the *Sunni* sect, of which he is so faithful a follower that he surpasses all his predecessors in external observation of the law, . . . when he took possession of the throne he proclaimed that it was with the design of insisting upon the law of Muhammad being observed in all its strictness, as it had been relaxed during the reigns of Shah Jahan his father and Jahangir his grandfather ’.¹ While Aurangzeb’s motives may have been the very high ones here indicated, the methods by which he attained his end were sinister in the extreme. To what extent this monarch, by deposing his father and disposing of his three brothers, changed the course of Indian history, will never be known. But in causing the death of the rightful heir, Dara Shikoh, Aurangzeb removed from the scene a prospective ruler, whose nobility, as distinct from his own scheming nature, might possibly have preserved the empire from the landslide with which it was threatened. Moreover, in further contrast to Aurangzeb, the elder prince, as we have seen from the illustrated album already referred to, showed an appreciation of the painter’s art which might have been the means of staving off its immediate decay. Fate, however, decreed that in the hands of this ambitious emperor and stern puritan the dynasty, together with an art which it had made its own, should decline. But before saddling Aurangzeb with the onus of dealing the Mughal miniaturists their death-blow, some of the facts that give credence to such a view may be examined. Of his religious oppression there are many accounts, but one of these has a special bearing on the subject of painting. A most loyal Hindu general, the Maharaja Jaswant Singh of Jodhpur, who served Aurangzeb faithfully, finally dying in his service, once wrote boldly objecting to his continued bigotry. In his letter he pointed out the freedom that was allowed to every sect in the reign of his predecessors, Akbar, Jahangir, and Shah Jahan, and then proceeded to admonish his sovereign in the following words :