Indian Painting under the Mughals, A.D. 1550 to A.D. 1750 c16.35

c16.35

The stories of Aurangzeb’s destruction of works of art are as numerous as those commonly related of Cromwell in England, but here the Rājput general’s picturesque simile seems to point to the fact that in India these were not legends but historical truths. Among many there is the account of the two statues of elephants with their riders which guarded the main gateway to the Delhi Fort. These were in position in the early part of Aurangzeb’s reign, as testified by Bernier, but were subsequently broken to pieces by an order from the throne. Further, many of the pictures in the Asar Mahal at Bijapur have obviously been purposely destroyed, and the local account, which is a very persistent one, is ‘that the emperor Aurangzeb defaced many of these with his own hands, all portraits and pictorial representations being offensive to bigoted Muhammadans like himself.’² Manucci, in his description of Akbar’s tomb at Sikandra, written at the end of the seventeenth century, notes that here ‘there were drawings of human figures. Over these the king Aurangzeb ordered a coat of whitewash to be applied so that the drawings might not be seen. He said such things were prohibited by the Muhammadan religion.’ The same writer’s humorous account of the emperor’s attitude towards the sister art of music may help also to explain his presumed aversion to painting. Aurangzeb, if the Italian’s gossip is to be believed, exercised at one period his right as king to prohibit certain social abuses which were prevalent in his dominions; accordingly he organized a department under an official to cope with these, and prevent them being continued. Among them was music, which the Mughal ruler considered was a much overcrowded profession; in the words of Manucci he objected to