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One of the most charming images in this exhibition about the Mughals is a watercolour of great delicacy, rather like a picture from a late medieval Book of Hours, showing a pilgrim on a journey with his staff and cloak, a winding road at his back with peasants in the field, a village in the distance and a pair of antelopes skipping off the page.
Oddly, there’s a turbaned semi-naked figure lying at his feet, looking as if he’s flying along the ground. The pilgrim is on his way to Mecca and the figure is an Indian Brahmin on his own pilgrimage, only he is crawling rather than walking, an act of humility that the Muslim takes to heart.
This encounter painted at the end of the 16th century, lavishly margined in gold, was, it seems, not unusual for the Mughal kingdom of the emperor Akbar. The Mughals traced their origins to two conquerors who represented terror and rapine, Tamurlane and Genghis Khan.
While they were no mean practitioners of the arts of violent conquest themselves, within their kingdom the Muslim rulers were hospitable to those of every religion and nation, welcoming the Jesuits from Portuguese Goa to Jains, Brahmins and Turks. It is Akbar (r.1556-1605) and his son Jahangir (r.1605-1627) and grandson Shah Jahan of Taj Mahal fame (r.1628-1658) who frame this exhibition, which spans the richest century of Mughal rule.
The dominant fashion of the court was Persian – though the use of Persian as a court language was probably on account of the difficulty of the alternatives. Whatever; the most striking aspect of the court was its hybrid Indian-Persian character, attracting Persian speaking poets and calligraphers from across the region: this cross-fertilisation is evident throughout the exhibition.
There are other influences too: in the illustration for Nizami Ganjavi’s Book of Alexander, we see a busy scene where a Persian-looking Alexander the Great is supervising the construction of a bronze wall (fires burning beneath the brickwork) to keep out the peoples of Gog and Magog – the great man, remember, got as far as India when his soldiers refused to go any further.
So: here is a 16th century Muslim dynasty deriving from the Turkic-Mongols, presiding over a Persian speaking court, ruling an overwhelmingly Hindu population, and keenly aware of the Greek influence of Alexander the Great. Now that is cultural diversity. Akbar was illiterate, but highly cultivated; he was a keen artist himself and there are no noticeable religious restraints on art in his reign.
The cultural pluralism meant he took a keen interest in the religion of his Hindu subjects; there are pictured accounts here of stories from Sanskrit epics. In the manuscripts stored and created in the House of Books there are tales of fantasy and adventure including is a Persian version of Rapunzel letting down her hair in one charming picture.
The advent of the Portuguese Jesuits in 1580 had a profound effect on Mughal art as well as the discussion of religion; European pictures here, including prints by Albrecht Durer, were copied and the art of perspective adopted. It was the Renaissance at one remove, through an Indian prism.
And of course the traffic worked both ways; there are a couple of fine pieces here from the Bargello in Florence: a fine priming flask for gunpowder with animals finely wrought in ivory, and a magnificent round shield of black lacquer richly inlaid with mother of pearl from Gujarat.
The exhibition is punctuated with showstopper pieces, one of the finest being a magnificent gold-hilted dagger and scabbard with no fewer than 1,685 rubies produced in the reign of Akbar’s son Jahangir (he who seizes the world). This, and the beautiful, naked gems on display at the close of the exhibition, are all integral to the show; ostentation was a form of power display in Mughal India as in Renaissance Europe.
The art of portraiture – stylised, profiled and static – reached a high point in Jahangir’s reign; there are some lovely examples from the Chester Beatty collection in Dublin. One of the most striking is of the Ethiopian former slave turned general, Malik Amber, with the formidable figure in white framed in gold with lots of lovely flowers in the margins.
That’s from the V&A’s own remarkable collection, which makes up about 40 per cent of the exhibition; one of the advantages of this show is that it puts some of those treasures in context. Also from the collection is the picture of the splendid zebra brought by Turks to the Mughal court and an equally showy turkey cock, which ends up on V&A Christmas cards.
The V&A provides some of the finest examples of Mughal ceramic tiles, with beautiful strong greens and yellows and striking floral design; indeed it plays to the very function of the museum by providing examples of design for us to copy and learn from.
There are inevitably some magnificent rugs, the oldest, made in the late 16th century, from the Louvre, full of animals entwined as in a manuscript, and the most spectacular, an enormous expanse of carpet punctuated on every side with rich red poppies.
The great art critic, Roger Fry, took a dim view of Indian art as “excessive and redundant… extravagant and exuberant”. This exhibition doesn’t prove him wrong but it also goes to show that extravagance and exuberance can be quite marvellous.
V&A, from November 9 to May 5; vam.ac.uk
