Indian Painting under the Mughals, A.D. 1550 to A.D. 1750 c18.40

c18.40

The styles of many other painters of Akbar’s reign may be described, but such a proceeding will not bring us any nearer to these men or reveal any details of their actual personality. Some of them, however, resolve themselves into small groups, as for instance the Kashmiri painters already mentioned, but more proficient than these were six very able painters from Gujarāt. Western India has a great artistic reputation, as seen in its architecture and its handicrafts, and the artists whom Akbar obtained from Ahmadabad and its neighbourhood contributed an important Rājasthānī element to the school. Two of the cleverest of the Gujarātīs were Bhim and Sur, who executed good drawings in the British Museum *Bāburnāma*, while another of the name of Kesu specialized in studies of trees and plants in the same manuscript. An analysis of the personnel of the school reveals one noticeable fact, which is, that in no sense was it a local effort, or a revival of a provincial movement stimulated into life by the proximity of a sympathetic court. On the contrary it had a wide geographical radius and included such diverse peoples as Gujarātīs and Turkis, Kashmiris and Kalmacks, Persians and Punjabis, all gathered into one place and working at one person’s command. In collecting these people together, however, Akbar was merely carrying out the custom of his race and age. We have seen that the sovereigns of his time were wont to obtain their craftsmen from far and wide, sending long distances for those who had the greatest reputation. His Mongol ancestor Hulagu Khan brought artisans from Pekin to prepare the courts of his capital at Maragha in Azarbaijan. His Timurid forbears sent to Hindustan for stone carvers to decorate their cities on the Oxus, while his grandfather Babur secured his chief architect from Albania. Afterwards his grandson Shah Jahan in working out his great building schemes made use of every expert he could command, from a Turkish engineer and a Shirazi inscription-writer, to an Italian lapidary and a renegade French jeweller. And Akbar's plan for his school of painting was conceived on the same broad lines. Not only were artists obtained from other countries noted for the excellence of their craftsmanship, but the confines of his own expanding territories were searched for the talent which his instincts told him they might contain. So this artistic community, comprising many diverse races and several creeds which he had brought together, grew into a school, and flourished; it flourished because it was animated with one object, which was to produce work of such a quality that it would earn the approval of the great mind responsible for its inception.