The issue of privacy in Indian court paintings of the Mughal period is fraught with ironies that illuminate the ambiguous and self-contradictory nature of the subject. It is fair to say that most miniatures were intended to be interleaved into books or albums for the royal library, and so were not for public display, though it seems clear that European visitors saw some of them, indicating that they were viewed by a 'public' of sorts from time to time. Can we find the private at all at the Mughal court? Two problems present themselves. First, is a private moment that has been represented by the artist, often present on the scene, properly thought of any longer as private? Another question arises from the class location of the subjects, who were enormously wealthy and powerful, and whose lives were the subject of popular gossip, legends, and both unofficial and official chronicles. Indeed, Akbar had court scribes follow him about through the day and record his every activity. Given the intense scrutiny under which they lived, and the public nature of most of what they did, including conceiving and giving birth to heirs, was there anything about the lives of Mughal royalty and courtiers that was private in any meaningful sense? The temporal location of the Mughal era in the early modern period--the era of gunpowder, silver abundance, European seafaring trading companies that signalled the advent of mercantile capitalism and a new sort of empire, the encounter and mingling of the great religious traditions, and other sorts of social change more local to India--further raises the question of how the private and its representation changed over time. Finally, the whole question of subjectivity and the evolution of the Indian self is broached by these paintings.
Even deciding what is private raises acute questions. It is easy to exclude the portrayals of public events--the court ceremonies with crowds milling around, the welcoming of sons or of ambassadors at court, the wedding processions, the battle scenes, the funerals. It is more difficult to decide what to include. Mere aloneness is clearly insufficient as a criterion, since the conventions of the portrait genre usually require the depiction of a single figure. Such a painting tells us nothing about the conception of privacy in and of itself. Rather, surely it is the nature of the activity being shown that denotes a private moment in an individual's life. Reading a book alone, or praying alone, are private activities. The very presence of the first and social value of each varies widely from society to society. Both occur in the Mughal paintings.
A group of persons, of course, can also be shown in a private setting. A conversation between two people is surely private. But other events raise questions. How private was the hunt, a favorite motif, in which Mughal noblewomen often took part and are shown doing so unveiled? The private is frequently associated with the domestic. Among Muslims living quarters were divided into public space (the biruni or mardanah) where unrelated males were entertained, and private space (the andaruni or zananah) where the females of the household could go about their activities unveiled and from which unrelated men were supposed to be excluded (Nath, Private Life of the Mughals of India, pp. 1-43). According to the norms of the Muslim aristocracy, no strange male could so much as gaze on the face of a Muslim noblewoman. Of course, Muslim peasant women did not veil for the most part even in the Middle East, and the one-room huts of the poor could hardly be segregated by gender, so that this norm was highly classed. In India, it is not clear that the Muslim middle strata much veiled, and most do not do so in a Middle Eastern sense even today. To make an equivalence between the zananah or internal living space and female presence, domesticity and privacy would not be entirely accurate. In the homes of the Muslim middling sort, extended families often lived together, so that the zananah was populated by numbers of cousins, both male and female, who were permitted to interact socially and without the necessity for veiling. While what went on in such households may be technically private, the crowds of relatives therein assembled might not strike us that way. At court, a gathering of women could occur in the zananah, such as would exclude men, and could be so large as to be clearly public in nature. Indeed, nobles maintained such large harems (Akbar had 5,000 women in his) that they could be seen as a sort of public female space in themselves--as a small town rather than a domestic setting. Yet the zananah does emerge as a favorite background for the depiction of private activities.
A Young Prince with a Book. Imperial Mughal, early 17th century. Private Collection. Pal, Court Paintings of India, p. 135.
Hindus, of course, could worship as individuals anywhere, and the range of everyday manifestations of the divine--from fire to pools of water to the sun--was so great that ample opportunities existed for individual adoration of them. The ascetic practices of Hindu sanyasis often involved withdrawal from society, an ultimate sort of privacy, and ascetics were a favorite theme of the miniaturists.
Mughal artists of both Hindu and Muslim background were often fascinated by Hindu worship, and even simple private devotions of, say, a girl to a small fire or a waking woman to the sun, could form a subject of interest to them. Rajput Hindus represented a key if minority population at the Mughal court. Since Akbar intermarried with the daughters of Rajput chieftains, many Mughal princes and princesses had Hindu mothers or aunts. These were officially said to be converts to Islam, but the evidence is that most wore their Islam lightly, and among the concubines and serving girls were many practicing Hindu women--as attested both by court chronicles and the archeology of some palaces, which reveals Hindu temples in the harem (Nath, Private Life, pp. 26). Hinduism had its place at the Mughal court, and unconverted Rajput warriors formed an important grouping within the Mughal army. At least ninety percent of the Mughal population belonged to the pre-Islamic South Asian religious traditions. The later Mughal painting of a woman worshipping at a shrine to the God Shiva, with a handful of other women in attendence, probably means to depict a small, private act of worship rather than a public one.
Jahangir, with typical straightforwardness, records in his memoirs a different sort of encounter with Hindu holy men, in which he argues them into monotheism with almost Cartesian rationality--though he seems perfectly content that they should be Hindu monotheists and does not demand conversion to Islam. He writes,
One day I observed to some learned Hindus that if the foundation of their religion rested upon their belief in the ten incarnate gods [avatars], it was entirely absurd; because in this case it became necessary to admit that the Almighty, who is infinite, must be endowed with a definite breadth, length, and depth. If they meant that in these bodies the supreme light was visible, it is equally visible in all things, it is not limited to them alone; and that if they said that these incarnate gods, were the emblems of His particular attributes, it is also not admissible, for, amongst the people of all religions, there have flourished persons who performed miracles, and were possessed of much greater power and talents than others of their time. After a long discourse, they at last admitted that there was a God who had no corporeal form, and of whom they had no definite notion. They said that as to understand that singular and invisible Being was beyond their comprehension, they could not form any idea of Him but by the means of some natural objects, and therefore they had made these ten figures the medium of raising their minds up to the Supreme God. I then told them that they could not attain that end by this means.None the Delhi sultans in the medieval period would have had such a reasoned discussion of religion with Hindu pandits, in which it is admitted that miracle workers and charismatic figures have existed "amongst the people of all religions," and in which the ruler contents himself with telling them they are wrong in their approach to the one God.
Conversations of Muslim learned men with others also formed a frequent theme. While some clearly show serious discussion or teaching, as with the painting of Maulavi Fazil Khan, not all appear to involve particularly pious encounters.
Maulavi Fazil Khan and companion. By Govardhan. Imperial Mughal, 1625-50. Private Collection. Pal, Court Paintings of India, p. 142.
The painting of a mullah and a musician conversing, attributed to Govardhan, raises many questions in this regard. Strict Muslim clergymen disapproved of music. There is something almost humanist about the easy intercourse between two craftsmen, each the master of a certain sort of cultural patterning--the musician comfortably sitting on the ground, the mullah fastidiously crouched on his haunches. A book lies on the ground before the man of God, while the performer clasps a mandolin-like instrument to his breast. It has been suggested to me that the artist intended to show a consultation on the composition of a song in praise of God (na`t) or of the Prophet, and in a South Asian Muslim context this idea seems plausible. On the other hand, they could just be discussing some subject of mutual interest. A conversation between two persons was a close as many Mughal courtiers got to a private one, since comments made in any larger group increasingly risked being repeated elsewhere, given the politics at court.
A Mullah and a Musician. Attributed to Govardhan. Imperial Mughal, 1625-50. Private Collection. Pal, Court Paintings of India, p. 143.
A Lady Coloring her Feet. Later Mughal, 1700-1750. Private Collection. Pal, Court Paintings of India, p. 184.
As with the male world, lively conversation between two persons was often depicted, as in "A Princess and her Companion."
A Princess and her Companion. Later Mughal, 1700-1725. Private Collection. Pal, Court Paintings of India, p. 181.
The entertainments of the leisured harem women are detailed. Two noblewomen played chess while their attendants performed music and served them drinks.
Ladies Playing Shatranj. Later Mughal, c. 1700. Private Collection. Pal, Court Paintings of India, p. 182.
Noblewomen could command their own, small, private concerts while being served refreshments.
Ladies Listening to Music. Mughal, about 1658. Panjab Museum, Chandigarh. Mohinder Singh Randhawa and John Kenneth Galbraith, Indian Painting: The Scene, Themes and Legends (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1968) , p. 51.
"Princess and Attendants on Balcony" shows a henna make-up party in which all the accoutrements of adornment are spread out and one noblewoman is making up another.
Princess and Attendants on Balcony. Later Mughal, c. 18th Century. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Samina Quraeshi with Annemarie Schimmel. Lahore: The City Within (Singapore: Concept Media, 1988), p. 27.
A popular theme was the women of the harem bathing or swimming in a pool. I would tentatively suggest that this topic was an innovation of the Jahangir period in Muslim court miniatures. I am sure there are no Safavid equivalents, and know of nothing similar in the Ottoman miniatures. It is often pointed out that even in Akbar's time, his mother was portrayed in a hawdaj, veiled. Jahangir's naturalism helped provoke a sea change in the depiction of women. There is even a painting of Jahangir's birth showing his Rajput mother on her birth bed, unveiled. There are paintings of his wife, the empress Nur Jahan, equally unveiled. Of course, the bath scenes go rather beyond simply shedding the veil. This motif was taken up by the subimperial courts such as Bijapur, by the painters in the post-Mughal successor states, and in Qajar Iranian painting of the nineteenth century, as well, as, of course, by the European Orientalists.
It strikes me as odd that most of the art history literature does not consider these paintings problematic. What was the cultural meaning attached to this species of public soft pornography at South Asian Muslim courts? It has been suggested to me by Afsaneh Najmabadi that these paintings draw upon the male artist's childhood memories of the women's bath, which mothers often took their sons to until the boy reached the age of seven. That a psychological dynamic should be operative in a medium so sensual and immediate as the book miniature seems entirely plausible. But I think also important here the influence of Rajput and other Hindu painting, which often showed the gopis or cowgirls bathing themselves in preparation for the amorous god Krishna's visit, or Krishna surprising them in the midst of their bathing, or even a mischievous Krishna making off with their clothing and leaving them stranded and naked in the pool. The Mughal miniaturists took over such themes from the Hindu courts and naturalized them, substituting the local prince for the god, and a palace bath for the rustic pool. The paintings were commissioned for their sensual and erotic aesthetic by male nobles and possibly by female ones as well. Many of these paintings vividly suggest a homoeroticism that would be unsurprising in large harems, thus hinting at an even more private set of moments behind the baths themselves.
Ladies bathing in a Pool. Later Mughal, c. 1700. Private Collection. Pal, Court Paintings of India, p. 183.
A Number of Women Swimming. Later Mughal, c. 18th Century. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Samina Quraeshi with Annemarie Schimmel. Lahore: The City Within (Singapore: Concept Media, 1988), p. 32.
The influence of the Krishna stories on Mughal ideas about coquetry and flirtation seems to me demonstrated by a comparison of the eighteenth century Rajput painting, "Krishna surprises Maidens at their bath, with the subimperial Bijapur rendering of "Prince surprises ladies bathing." In both cases, the artist suggests by the womens' attitudes that at least some of them are not as dismayed as convention would expect of them.
Prince surprises ladies bathing. Bijapur, 1675-1700. Private Collection. Pal, Court Paintings of India, p. 200.
Krishna suprises Maidens at their Bath. Bundi, about 1770. Kanvar Sangram Singh, Jaipur. Mohinder Singh Randhawa and John Kenneth Galbraith, Indian Painting: The Scene, Themes and Legends (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1968) , p. 81.
The Persian ideal of naz or the unpredictable coquetry of the lover, is acted out in the Bijapur painting of a young man at court showing submissiveness to the object of his affections. Naz reversed the conventional expectations of patriarchal authority, its very arbitrariness bestowing a sort of power on otherwise repressed women, and occasionally forcing men to their knees.
The Submissive Lover. Bijapur, 1675-1700. Private Collection. Pal, Court Paintings of India, p. 199.
The seventeenth century Mughal turn from books illustrating medieval fables toward greater realism led painters to show scenes of romance between historical personages. Govardhan's depiction of Jahangir embracing Nur Jahan is an example of this tendency, though note that it was painted or at least completed after Jahangir's death, and so seems likely to have been commissioned by Nur Jahan herself. The embrace is shown as mutual, with the couple's eyes meeting, in contrast to many Indian love scenes in which the woman's back is to the man or in which he towers over her.
Jahangir and Nur Jahan. Ca. 1632. Govardhan. A page from the Kevorkian Album. Metropolitan Musem of Art, New York. Okuda, pp. 192.
Prince Dara Shikoh and Ra`nadil. Mughal, about 1658.. The Maharaja of Jaipur, Jaipur Museum. Mohinder Singh Randhawa and John Kenneth Galbraith, Indian Painting: The Scene, Themes and Legends (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1968) , p. 53.
If the Jaipur painting of Dara Shukoh and Ra`nadil is correctly dated to 1658, it is not only an depiction of an intimate romantic scene but in retrospect quite touching. In the painting, Dara Shukoh has taken her hand and is offering her to drink (probably wine) as one female attendant pours another glass and another plays sitar. Dara Shukoh was at that time the heir apparent and Ra`nadil his favorite wife. By mid-March, 1659, Dara Shukoh had been defeated in a succession crisis sparked by his father Shahjahan's illness and his brother Aurangzeb's ambition, and soon thereafter was executed. Aurangzeb attempted to add all his brother's wives and concubines to his own harem, but Ra`nadil resisted. The story told by a Western traveller goes that he summoned her and she refused to come. He insisted, saying it was a brother's duty to take care of his sisters-in-law when they were widowed. Ra`nadil is said to have asked what Aurangzeb particularly liked about her. He replied that it was her hair. She cut it off and sent it to him, saying he now had what he wanted and should leave her alone. When Aurangzeb persisted, Ra`nadil is said to have taken a knife and slashed her face, putting a kerchief to it to record the scars. She sent the kerchief to Aurangzeb, who finally relented and consented to leave her alone. (Randhawa & Galbraith, pp. 49-50, quoting Storia do Mogor.) Of course, that this story comes to us from a European raises all sorts of questions about its truth and the degree to which the narrative and emotions depicted were filtered through a foreign culture. Yet the tale seems to me to contain folkloric motifs such as repetition, and if not true it may at least be indigenous. And the very existence of the 1658 painting does point to something special in the relationship of the two, to a tenderness that contrasts with Jahangir's bear hug and with the frankly lascivious embraces into which the Rajput chieftains are often shown drawing their women. Was the love of Dara Shukoh and Ra`nadil somehow early modern in character? After his death, she successfully resists being treated as mere property, the spoils of war, asserting her autonomy as a person by being willing to discard outward marks of beauty. This behavior is very different from that of the medieval Layla, who acquiesces dutifully in her family's plans for her, driving her beloved mad. A new set of roles for wealthy women emerged in the Mughal period, insofar as they took full advantage of Islam's bestowal on women of property rights (to a far greater extent than was true in most premodern European law). Nur Jahan had asserted herself by running large estates, long-distance commercial ventures, and even, during Jahangir's more besotted moments, the empire itself, along with a network of female and male family members. Aurangzeb's Muslim legalism and pietism may have been in part intended as a patriarchal riposte to these signs of greater power and individuality among royal women, and the story of Ra`nadil may have been intended to show its limits.
Prince Murad Bakhsh receiving a Lady at Night. Victoria and Albert Museum. (Philip S. Rawson, Indian Painting (Paris: Pierre Tisne, 1961), p. 117.
A painting of Dara Shukoh's brother Murad Bakhsh calling a concubine from the harem to his bed one night may be more typical, to be sure, of the Mughal princes' relationship with women. Paintings of the Jahangir period in the early seventeenth century had already pioneered in explicitly depicting foreplay in the harem, though the individuals appear to be generic figures rather than specific personalities. As with the miniatures of women bathing naked, these love scenes, so different from the medieval miniatures illustrating romances, raise questions about whether a new frankness about sex did not emerge at the seventeenth century Mughal court. Here, too, the influence of Hindu erotic art, from Ajanta with its erotic wall carvings, to paintings and illustrations of the Kama Sutra and the amorous adventures of the Hindu gods and goddesses, must have introduced the Central Asian Muslims of the court to a new, public aesthetic of the erotic. They proved somewhat susceptible to it, divorcing such themes from any hint of the sacred, and historicizing them, transporting them from mythology into the actually-existing harems of the princes and courtiers. By now they were a very long way indeed from the medieval Muslim romances, with their earnest tales of unrequited knightly love. The question of how private the huge Mughal harems were is posed acutely by "A Prince in the Harem" from the Heeramaneck Collection, which shows a young man being pulled down by a woman, as other women sleep on the floor all around them and guards run about shouting just below.
Lovers. Mughal, about 1625. The Maharaja of Jaipur, Jaipur Museum. Mohinder Singh Randhawa and John Kenneth Galbraith, Indian Painting: The Scene, Themes and Legends (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1968) , p. 37.
A Prince in the Harem. India, circa 1600-1605. Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Nasli and Alice Heeramaneck Collection. Repr. Findley, "The Pleasures of Women." Asian Art Spring, 1993, p. 72.
A Royal Couple in Dalliance. Later Mughal at Farrukhabad, c. 1775. Private Collection. Pal, Court Paintings of India, p. 191.
A royal couple in a pavilion with attendants. Sub-imperial Mughal, c. 1595. Private Collection. Pal, Court Paintings of India, p. 172.
A Royal Child. Imperial Mughal, 1600-1623. Private Collection. Pal, Court Paintings of India, p. 133.
The way in which the particular wife with whom the prince or courtier was spending his evening became the hostess is visible in a number of paintings. The harem had its hierarchy, with the four legal wives at the top and favorite concubines next. Many of the other thousands of women therein were actually servants to the women above them in this hierarchy. In essence, noblewomen commanded a large contingent of maidservants, whom they could summon for the purposes of entertaining their husband.
A Princess Entertaining in a Tent. Sub-imperial Mughal, 1600-1625. Private Collection. Pal, Court Paintings of India, p. 176.
Nur Jahan also was capable of reducing Jahangir to a guest in his own palace. Findly explicates the painting, "Jahangir and Prince Khurram feasted by Nur Jahan," as follows:
Baleji and Baji Rao Hunting. Later Mughal or Rajput, 1700-1725. Private Collection. Pal, Court Paintings of India, p. 179.
Nur Jahan, an excellent shot, carried a musket for hunting, and even substituted herself for the emperor in 1619. In his memoirs, Jahangir writes,
The Death of Inayat Khan from His Debauches. Mughal. Ca. 1618. Bodleian Library, Oxford. Rawson, Indian Painting, p. 114.
The painting shows an emaciated Inayat Khan sitting sideways on a divan, legs outstretched, and back propped up by a large cylindrical Mughal pillow. His shirt is open, showing his ribs, and he has several days stubble on his chin. He is wearing a cap indoors. He is said to be dying of "debauchery," and if this means from an addiction to drugs or alcohol, his death had special significance for Jahangir, an alcoholic and heavy opium user himself who on occasion got the shakes so vehemently that he had to take to his sick bed. The moment of death can be very private, but here it was shared by the emperor and his artists, not for the purposes of commiseration but in order to record it exactly, like the death of a lion. This clinical observation for the purpose of producing a permanent record of the event, which we now witness, seems the very opposite of a private moment.
It should be obvious by now that my initial inquiry about whether the Mughal court offered any spaces for what we would think of as the private can be answered in the negative. Conversations could not be depended upon to remain confidential or easily kept from being overheard by the cloud of male and female servants, a zananah or harem with 5,000 inhabitants all freely circulating is hardly a private place, and the prince in the painting in the Heeramaneck Collection is shown contemplating making love to one favorite while surrounded by other women who escaped being bothered that night. If it is true that Jahangir before his ascension to the thrown had an affair with one of his father's concubines, Anarkali, that private matter quickly circulated in the bazaar and reached the ears of European travelers. If it is not true, his private life was still being widely bandied about, only inaccurately. The social geography of the palace tended to erase the sort of gaps and interstices in social life that often define the private for us. When we ask, "Where is the private?" it is easy to reply that it inheres in the private residence, and this idea of the private existed in medieval Muslim jurisprudence. This proposition was not true for those at court, who lived in a sort of panopticon. Still, Mughals clearly did engage in private activities, and I have catalogued some of them. Much reading was social and aloud, but some persons are shown reading alone. Conversing on a non-political or otherwise innocuous subject was possible for two or three persons, such that the privacy of the event was unlikely to be violated. And while the zananah is probably better thought of as a gender-segregated, female public space, private activities did occur there, from small chess matches to love-making.
Was there anything early modern about the sensibility visible in these paintings? I say "early modern" quite deliberately, since the tendency of some historians of European thought to begin the "modern" with Descartes seems to me problematic. If the "modern" is connected with political liberty, mercantile ascendancy, the disenchantment of the world and the rise of Deism, then we see little of those phenomena in Mughal India before the conquests of the British East India Company. But neither was most of Europe "modern" in those senses in the seventeenth and much of the eighteenth century. But if we consider the absolutist states of European early modernity, 1500-1750, then Mughal India has certain resonances with them. Certainly, in the importance of gunpowder and artillery to the military, in the centrality of New World silver to the monetized Mughal economy, in the large and relatively efficient bureaucracy made possible by the extensively coin-based economic system, and in the vastness of global cultural interaction, the Mughal Empire was distinctly early modern in character. (Its predecessor, the Delhi sultanate, had been a realm of Muslim knights shooting bows and arrows and dominating Hindu peasants, impregnable castles, slave soldiers and a lively slave trade north, and a barter economy made necessary by bullion famine and the smallness of international trade). Although I would be reluctant to see these historical changes as mechanistically producing a change in consciousness, they clearly enabled elite Indians to think in new ways about many issues, including their selves. Babur's own remarkable memoir was surely provoked in part by his encounter with India, which set off his native Ferghanah, in Turkic Central Asia, as one cultural and ecological reason among many. Jahangir's memoirs are even more frank and personal, with the first person diction emerging clearly and persistently, and private problems like his alcoholism and opium addiction, freely discussed. The concentration of his atelier on realistic depictions of flora, fauna and human beings is very different from the focus of Akbar's painters on the heroic epic and Persian and Indian fables, and signals a new, naturalistic sensibility. Even Islam is relativized and seen as one religion among many, and not peculiar in its monotheism.
The sense of individuality visible in both the Jahangiri paintings and in his memoirs seems to me to derive in part from the cultural pluralism of that place and time. Jahangir had been brought up with his father Akbar's idiosyncratic religious beliefs rather than with strict Islam. Akbar's court had been the site of vigorous debates between Portuguese Jesuits, Zoroastrian mobeds, Muslim ulama, and Hindu pandits, a cultural encounter made possible in part by the early modern maritime empires. Jahangir appears to have drifted back toward more Islamic ideas later on, despite a private cult of the Mother Mary, though he had no patience for what he saw as bigotted Muslim clergymen who thought too highly of themselves. (He had a Shi`ite ayatollah executed in Lahore and imprisoned the Sufi holy man, Shaykh Ahmad Sirhindi for making grandiose claims). Jahangir was aware of too many disparate cultural worlds to belong to any of them in an unreflective manner. Mughal pluralism, rather than the failed Akbarian syncretism, resulted in an alienation of the self from the self that may have manifested itself partially Jahangir's escape into alcoholism and opium addiction. His liminality also made him open to a humanistic and naturalistic view of the world. He was Francis Bacon's contemporary in more than one sense, for the Mughal discovery of Indian and European culture paralleled Renaissance Europe's encounter with the New World and the Orient. If Mughal naturalism did not, unlike that of the contemporary William Harvey, run to experiments with cadavers, it did at least involve the careful and unblinkered study of phenomena like human death. The contrast between the painting of the death of Inayat Khan and the typical productions of Akbar's ateliers in the sixteenth century, with their large numbers of medieval fables and epics, is stark.
I have argued that the new assertiveness of Mughal women like Nur Jahan and Ra`nadil is also related to early modern opportunities for the powerful women of the harem to profit from investment in long-distance trade and in the more valuable agriculture of a monetized economy. Part of that assertiveness involved carving out a sense of the private self that remained distinct from royal or familial duty, as Ra`nadil demonstrated so graphically to Aurangzeb. Finally, the Mughal encounter with Hindu sensuality and eroticism gave rise to a new sort of concern in the Persian miniature. The Mughals secularized stories such as Krishna and the gopis, employing their motifs to frame naturalistic studies of the romantic and sex life of the court. This humanistic appropriation of divine eroticism allowed a new frankness in depicting the most private and intimate moments of these early modern nobles. The cultural pluralism of India from this period forward, and its intensive interaction with Muslim, Hindu and European cultural heritages, helped to define a distinctive Indian conception of selfhood available to those who inhabited more than one cultural world. Of course, many Indians lived in isolated villages or, if urban, managed to close out these pluralistic interventions, but even the latter required effort and involved a nativist reaction against the Other. Ways of being Indian and being modern or postmodern, so familiar to us even today, are prefigured in the late sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries--the avid syncretist as with Akbar and the Kayvanis, the wounded nativist as with Shivaji or Aurangzeb, and the alienated naturalist, as with Jahangir and many of his miniaturists. It is possible that in these miniatures we watch being born that most private thing of all, the early modern Indian self.
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The Women's Quarters
The zananah or women's quarters formed among the more popular subjects for court paintings, ironically enough, given that they were in ordinary society completely shielded from public view. It may be that some of the paintings were commissioned by emperors or princes for their own viewing, for reasons of the heart or out of a naturalistic desire to have a complete record made of the natural world (one motive that drove Jahangir's commissions). We know that some powerful women, such as the empress Nur Jahan, commissioned paintings themselves and they may have requested scenes be painted of the world in which they lived. Women putting on various sorts of make-up proved a popular subject, whether the application of kohl, a sort of eye liner, or decorating the hands and feet with henna in complex patterns.
Romance
The miniaturists boldy limn moments of romance and passion. They were able in doing so to draw upon both the Persian traditions of illustrated romance narratives and the Hindu religious and secular romantic literature in Sanskrit. (It is probably also true that Mughal court life had provided them with models for their paintings of fabled lovers such as Farhad and Shirin). The mingling of the Persian and Hindu traditions, along with the Mughal tendency toward naturalizing and even secularizing them, produced a rich and innovative approach to private emotion, with greater range than is visible in the medieval romances. For instance, the Layla and Majnun story popularized by Nizami and `Attar and frequently illustrated in Iranian and Mughal miniatures shows Majnun as the distraught lover left somewhat unbalanced and roaming in the desert seeking his beloved Layla, denied to him because of her arranged marriage to someone else. In these paintings Layla is shown as the object of devotion but seems to me somewhat opaque with regard to her own emotions. The Rajput painters, in contrast, enjoyed showing a woman pining for her lover, as the gopis pined for Krishna, lying on her couch, back arched seductively. In Mughal miniatures, both women and men are allowed an intensity of feeling.
Domestic Life
The painters and their patrons were interested, as well, in the aftermath of courting, in domestic life. Miniaturists depicted aristocratic couples enjoying one another's company and did portraits of children.
Jahangir and Prince Khurram feasted by Nur Jahan, India, ca. 1617
Freer Gallery of Art; Findly, "The Pleasure of Women," p. 80
An album painting depicts the festivities hosted by Nur Jahan for Jahangir and his son Prince Khurram in honor of the latter's conquests in the Deccan. The party took place in October 1617 in Mandu . . . although Jahangir is still the dominant figure . . . he now shares the viewer's attention with Nur Jahan, who is not only clearly in charge but supported as well by an army of women. While they do not intimidate, their numbers and their confident demeanor celbrate an autonomous environment of pleasure in which Jahangir and Khurram are still, decidedly, guests. Moreover, the cups of wine, the luxurious textures of cloth and stone, and the open necklies and midriffs indicate something new has happened to the lives of zanana women.
Such a large party, of course, is private only in the sense that its main figures are the three royals and it occurred in the zananah. These paintings reinforce a sense that the Mughal nobles, however powerful they may have been in the outside world, entered their own harems as guests of a sort, and that this space formed a realm of female power and organization.Hunting
Hunting parties on private or royal estates were often small enough to be thought of as private, and this activity was central to aristocratic identity. As late as 1947, when the leaders of the princely states who had been left in local power by the British faced the absorption of their realms into independent India, among their main questions for a rather disgusted Nehru was whether their hunting grounds would remain exclusive to them. Jahangir once had his staff calculate how much game he had killed in the hunt up to 1617, and they estimated over 28,000 birds and animals (Jahangir, Memoirs, p. 108). It is clear from the miniatures that both Muslim and Rajput women also went out on hunting parties.
Nur Jahan with a Firearm, Hunting
(Abu'l-Hasan, ca. 1612-1615, Raza Library, Rampur; Beach, Mughal and Rajput Painting, p. 96.
My huntsmen reported to me that there was in the neighborhood (of Mathura) a tiger, which greatly distressed the inhabitants. I ordered his retreat to be closely surrounded with a number of elephants. Towards evening I an my attendants mounted and went out. As I had made a vow not to kill any animal with my own hands, I told Nur Jahan to fire my musket. The smell of the tiger made the elephant very restless, and he would not stand still, and to take good aim from a howda is a very difficult feat. Mirza Rustam, who after me has no equal as a marksman, had fired three or four shots from an elephant's back without effect. Nur Jahan, however, killed this tiger with the first shot.
The danger and urgency involved in hunting such a dangerous animal as a tiger added to the camaraderie of the private hunting party, which is among the few sites we know of for aristocratic interaction across the lines of gender segregation outside of the zananah. The appreciation of the emotional intensity sought and achieved here is typical of the humanistic outlook of Mughal rulers like Babur and Jahangir, an outlook that seems to have been at home in the pluralistic Mughal empire, in contrast to Aurangzeb's later Muslim legalism.Death
A final example and anecdote richly illustrates the ironies to which I have repeatedly referred in the Mughal miniatures' representation of private life. Let me draw your attention to the famous Death of Inayat Khan now in the Bodleian. The realism of the Jahangiri atelier, Rawson remarks,
"reached its zenith in the famous picture in Oxford of Inayat Khan on his deathbead. Jehangir's journal tells us how the emperor had the Khan, who was in the act of dying from his debauchery, carried into his presence. The emperor was an interested spectator of the event, and ordered his artists to record the appearance of his dying courtier with the same dispassionate care as they did that of the dead lion" (Rawson, pp. 113-114).
Questions to answer:
The study of privacy, no less than its portrayal by artists, quite often constitutes an invasion of it. What to make of the way in which the Persian miniatures depicted Muslim noblewomen in domestic settings, unveiled and often in various states of undress, whereas in the real social world of mixed company they would have been veiled, frequently secluded, and it would have been worth a man's life to gaze upon a barefaced, much less barebreasted, queen? The emperor could not have been unaware that ultimately others would see these paintings, and some did in his own lifetime, if only the artists in the atelier. The naturalistic conventions of the Persian miniature were influenced by Mongol and Chinese predecessors, Hindu and European contemporaries, and by the worldly if not exactly secular outlook of the Mughal court itself. They created a paradox wherein private scenes, including female faces, were made, if not public, then at least accessible to some sorts of public at some times. The paintings surveyed are full of the conundrums of the private as spectacle. What the miniatures offer us is not a pair of binoculars for taking a peek at Mughal private life, but a complex polychrome catalogue of the ways the artists and their patrons thought about it. We see here not the private but the conventions by which these early moderns represented it. The private is achieved by erasing from the scene the crowds of courtiers, servants and hangers on that lurked throughout the palaces. A single boy is shown, even though we know he must be surrounded by ayahs and aunts. A romantic couple is depicted, with just one or two attendants, even though more no doubt stand outside the door to do their bidding, and that they are having a romantic dinner on the balcony that evening which may lead in turn to the conception of a future prince or emperor was probably common knowledge among their servants, courtiers and relatives. Govardhan's rendering of Jahangir and Nur Jahan hugging likewise shows them alone, an unlikely state. Inayat Khan certainly looks as though he is dying alone, but only because the naturalist gaze of the emperor and his dutiful artists is implicit in the painting rather than being explicit. An invented aloneness or smallness of company underlies the artists' approach to showing the private.
