|
2. A ROYAL ELEPHANT India (Deccan, Ahmadnagar) 1590-1595 Height: 32.8 cm Width: 24.2 cm |
Ink heightened with colours and gold on paper, mounted an eighteenth century album page. This splendid nim qalam (half brush or lightly coloured) portrait of a running elephant is one of the great drawings from the Deccani school of Ahmadnagar, where a brief flowering of the arts took place in the late sixteenth century. According to Mark Zebrowski in his pioneering study, Deccani Painting, 1983, p. 17, three Ahmadnagar sultans were generous and enlightened patrons of painting: Husain Nizam Shah I (1554-1565) and his sons, Murtaza I (1565-1588) and Burhan II (1591-1595). Their reigns provided a period of political stability, to which a small group of brilliant portraits, mainly drawings, can be ascribed, before the civil wars of the late 1590s and the Mughal capture of the capital in 1600 plunged the country into chaos.(1) This drawing has been assigned by Zebrowksi and other scholars including Stuart Cary Welch, from whose collection it emanates, to the short reign of Burhan II and thus dated to circa 1590-1595. The richly caparisoned elephant charges across the page at great speed, ridden by a mahout so brimming with confidence that he does not hold onto any reins, but grips the elephant only with his legs. He grasps with both hands the impressive ankus (elephant goad) with which he controls the thunderous beast. Like so many of the personages, regardless of rank, which we see in surviving Ahmadnagar drawings, the mahout is dressed simply but distinctively, with an assured sense of style. His turban is a conical ziggurat with stacked concentric layers of coils, the cloth gleaming and metallic in texture and perhaps braided in gold. His patka (sash) is tied in a suave loop and holds a katar (push-dagger) in a scabbard. The haft of his ankus is decorated with elegant ball mouldings (nala). The elephant is even more dashing and wears two sarpechs, one on its head band, from which a hairy red tassel is also suspended, and another on its forehead with two dark feathers and a sarpati of flaming red hair. Bells are worn on chains across the body, on its collar, and tinkling from anklets. Completing the ensemble are three saddle cloths layered on top of each other, one textured like fur, the others of fine red wool, and all with undulating wavy edges. The drawing is by the same hand as a scene of a “Royal Picnic” in the India Office Library, London, which shows Burhan II enthroned under a tree with attendants. This is illustrated by Zebrowski on p. 29, no. 17, and by Toby Falk and Mildred Archer, Indian Miniatures in the India Office Library, 1981, pp. 221 and 499, no. 401. Falk and Archer note the stylistic influence of Persian painting on this and other Ahmadnagar drawings of the period. The drawing also shows the influence of contemporary Mughal art. However, it is imbued with a sense of something quite distinctive and vibrant that is neither Iranian nor Mughal; an intangible feeling of playful motion, and a spirited, almost ethereal character, which are hallmarks of Deccani work. Milo Cleveland Beach describes Sultan Burhan’s elephant in glowing terms as a drawing “in a non-Mughal Indian style very close to contemporary Iranian taste. It is a tense, superbly controlled drawing, full of vitality. The aliveness is less due to the subject than to the line, which by twisting and turning, becoming thicker and thinner, forces our eyes continually to move across the surface. Such details as the bottom of the saddle cloth show us that the line, while suggestive of particular objects, moves quite independently of them. It is the rhythm of the line, not that of the saddle cloth, that we observe.”(2) Indeed, all the scholars that have written about this celebrated drawing have commented on its exquisite line. Welch observes that the “marked personal style [of the artist] is notable for its strong wiry line, alternating with an unmistakable wiggly one, as here at the edge of the saddle blanket.”(3) Zebrowksi notes that Burhan II spent years of exile at the court of the emperor Akbar during his brother Murtaza’s reign, so the style of painting he patronised on his return was strongly marked by Mughal taste. The running elephant has the fast and furious mood of Akbar’s illustrated manuscripts.(4) However, strong decorative elements like the elephant’s coiled trunk, curved tail and stippled hide, dominate the picture in a way that is alien to Mughal realism.(5) Provenance: The Sevadjian Collection, Paris The Stuart Cary Welch Collection Exhibited and Published: Stuart Cary Welch, Indian Drawings and Painted Sketches: 16th-19th Centuries, The Asia House Galleries, New York, 1976, pp. 76-77, cat. no. 36. Milo Cleveland Beach, The Art of India and Pakistan, Duke University, Durham, 1985; the exhibition continued on tour to the Dixon Gallery and Gardens, Memphis, and the Speed Art Museum, Louisville. Published: Stuart Cary Welch, Splendid Deccani Painting, Marg, vol. XVI, no. 2, March 1963, pp. 7-17. Milo Cleveland Beach, The Grand Mogul: Imperial Painting in India 1600-1660, 1978, p. 21, fig. 1. Mark Zebrowski, Deccani Painting, 1983, p. 28, no. 16. References: 1. Mark Zebrowski, Deccani Painting, 1983, p. 17. 2. Milo Cleveland Beach, The Grand Mogul: Imperial Painting in India 1600-1660, 1978, p. 21. 3. Stuart Cary Welch, Indian Drawings and Painted Sketches: 16th-19th Centuries, 1976, p. 76. 4. Zebrowski, 1983, p. 27. 5. Ibid. |