The Laud Ra gamala Album, Bikaner, and the Sociability of Subimperial Painting

Molly Emma Aitken

The City College of New York

The Mughal emperor Akbar’s mans˙abda¯rs (rank holders or officials) came from Hindu and Muslim society and from around and beyond the Indian Sub continent. They met at the imperial court, and fought, traveled, and socialized with one another, partaking in an elite culture strongly inflected by the Emperor Akbar’s policy of s˙ulh˙-i kul or ‘‘peace with all.’’1In the spirit of this policy, Akbar (r. 1556–1605) spoke Hindi as well as Persian, flirted with indigenous practices like vegeta rianism, sponsored the construction of Hindu temples, and patronized Indian rı¯ti (a tradition of court) poetry and indigenous musical traditions like dhrupad. Among Akbar’s courtiers were Rajput aristocrats, some of them rulers of regional kingdoms who brought their own tra ditions into the mix while also embracing the broader culture of the court. Several built ambitiously in the im perial style, sponsored mosques as well as temples, and patronized paintings infused with Persian patterns and conventions yet often rooted in Indic literature and pic torial conventions that predated the Mughals.2

Though the Mughal embrace of disparate cultural forms, practices, and beliefs is especially compelling in today’s communally tense, intermingled world, scholars are only beginning to understand it. This essay enters the subject through the well-known early-seventeenth century tome called the Laud Ra¯ gama¯ la¯ Album, now at Oxford’s Bodleian Library. It is motivated by the dis covery of preparatory materials that were in the posses sion of artists from the Rajput court of Bikaner until the mid-twentieth century, and that bear compositions match ing three pages of the Laud Album. The match opens a new perspective on art of the period. It offers insight into early Mughal responses to ‘‘pre-Mughal’’ painting conventions, and it promises a new perspective on what is called ‘‘subimperial’’ patronage, meaning patronage by non-imperial patrons.3 The essay does two kinds of work. Employing connoisseurship and historical con textualization, the first and longest portion lays the groundwork for understanding  the discovery: it revisits the scholarship on the Laud Album, expands existing

scholarship on early Bikaner painting, and explores the relationships that link the Laud Album to Bikaner. Part two builds on this evidence to reorient current thinking about early-seventeenth-century ‘‘subimperial’’ painting. Taking an interpretive approach, this section analyzes the place of the Ra¯ gama¯ la¯ pages in a Mughal album to view the Laud Album as an early and richly suggestive example of Mughal responsiveness to Rajput culture. This final section turns to the growing literature in South Asian art history on cultural translation, and considers translation in the context of sociability.4

I. The Discovery

The preparatory materials in question come from about six hundred Bikaner court artists’ workshop drawings, sketches, pounces, and paintings, which are now in a private collection in the United States. These works were purchased from a late member of the Lalani Usta clan of artists who were in service to the Bikaner court in India from the late sixteenth until the twentieth century.5 Ex tensive research has given credence to the collection. As a whole it is stylistically consistent with Bikaner painting, numerous drawings bear inscriptions to known Bikaner masters, and many correspond to published Bikaner paintings. Among the early works, for example, one fragment traces a portion of a Deccan painting that a Bikaner ruler purchased from Bhagnagar (Hyderabad). A drawing of a horse and rider corresponds to eques trian portraits of the Bikaner ruler Maharaja Anup Singh (r. 1669–1698), one of them ascribed to the master Ruknuddin, while a woman worshipping a Shiva lin˙ga (a form of Shiva) below a tree was a model for an eighteenth-century Bikaner painting identified as Sain dhavı¯ Ra¯ ginı¯. A nı¯m qalam (tinted drawing) matches a picture of the prophet Sulaiman amid angels that bears a Bikaner palace stamp, and a drawing of a herd of buffalo seems to have been the basis for a hunt scene the Bikaner artist Rashid painted for Maharaja Anup Singh.6 A number of late-nineteenth-century preparatory

Fig. 1. Hind˙ola Ra¯ ga. India, Bikaner, early 17th c. Kha¯ ka: holes on paper (warqa), reverse covered in charcoal, approx. 18.5   10.3 cm. Previously in the Lalani Usta family, on loan to the Bodleian Library, Oxford.

sketches relate to portraits of the Bikaner ruler Sardar Singh (r. 1872–1887) now at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the San Diego Museum of Art.7 The collec tion can only be what it is purported to be: the accu mulated workshop holdings of Bikaner’s Usta painters. As such, it is a reliable and invaluable source of infor mation on Bikaner painting.8

Among the most astonishing discoveries in the col lection are three pinhole-pricked pieces of paper bear ing compositions that match three pages in the Laud Ra¯ gama¯ la¯ Album. Their style, key motifs, and sartorial details date them to the early seventeenth century (Figs.

Fig. 2. Gun˙akalı¯ Ra¯ ginı¯. Bikaner, early 17th c. Kha¯ ka: holes on paper (warqa), reverse covered in charcoal, approx. 14.8   12.8 cm. Previously in the Lalani Usta family collection, on loan to the Bodleian Library, Oxford.

1–3). Such pricked papers were pounced with charcoal, which transferred their compositions through the holes onto a second piece of paper. One term for them is charba, a Persian word that originally applied to tracing papers, but which is sometimes used for pinhole compo sitions. In India, the process of pouncing is sometimes called ‘‘kha¯ ka jharana,’’ or ‘‘pouncing of dust,’’ and both the pounce and the pricked sheet used to make a pounce can be called a kha¯ ka. By the mid-nineteenth century, Bikaner’s Usta artists were using the term kha¯ ka, and I will employ it here.9

The three kha¯ kas in question picture standard Ra¯ ga ma¯ la¯ iconography: one, Hin˙d˙ola Ra¯ ga, depicts a man on a swing surrounded by attendants (Fig. 1); the second, Gun˙akalı¯ Ra¯ ginı¯, portrays a woman kneeling before a pot of curling foliage (Fig. 2); and the third, Vasanta Ra¯ ginı¯, shows Krishna dancing in the rain with the gopı¯s (cowherd girls) (Figs. 3, 4). Each kha¯ ka has been rubbed with charcoal on one side, indicating it has been used. Because of their generic iconography, I did not initially recognize the kha¯ kas for what they were. While I was looking at Laud Album reproductions with Shanane 

Fig. 3. Vasanta Ra¯ ginı¯. Bikaner, early 17th c. Kha¯ ka: holes on paper (warqa), reverse covered in charcoal, approx. 13   11 cm. Previously in the Lalani Usta family collection, on loan to the Bodleian Library, Oxford.

Fig. 4. Detail of Vasanta Ra¯ ginı¯ in Figure 3.

Fig. 5. Hind˙ola Ra¯ ga. Author’s reversed drawing connecting dots on printed photograph of Hind˙ola Ra¯ ga kha¯ ka. Original reproduced in Figure 1. (Second bird is indicated in the kha¯ ka, but too faintly to trace.)

with the direction of the compositions in the Laud Album, and a visit with Davis to the Bodleian Library, whichwill now keep the kha¯ kas on loan, confirmed that their size matches the original paintings. The only differences Davis, who has published a book on the Usta collection, Davis perceived the match between the Usta kha¯ kas and three compositions in the album (Figs. 6, 8, 10). The sides of the kha¯ kas rubbed with charcoal are consistent lie in precision and complexity: the kha¯ kas are more finely crafted and contain elements left out of the final paintings.

John Seyller has argued that the Laud Ra¯ gama¯ la¯ Album was produced in the workshop of the Mughal nobleman Abdul Rahim, who bore the title Kha¯nkha¯na¯n in Akbar’s court.10 Seyller attributed most of the album’s

Fig. 6. Hind˙ola Ra¯ ga. Attributed to Fazl, workshop of Abdul Rahim, early 17th c. Opaque watercolor and gold on paper (wasli), page 38   24.6 cm. Bodleian Library, Oxford, MS. Laud Or. 149 fol. 29a.

Ra¯ gama¯ la¯ pages to Abdul Rahim’s painter Fazl. Seyller’s argument is precise and convincing. Our findings support his, but enrich the story. The first question pursued here is how kha¯ kas that ended up with Bikaner’s artists could match paintings for Abdul Rahim.

a. The Laud Ra¯gama¯la¯ Album and the Bikaner Kha¯kas

The Archbishop Laud donated the eponymous Laud Ra¯ gama¯ la¯ Album to Oxford’s Bodleian Library in 1640, a year before his execution for ‘‘offences against reli gion.’’11 It was one of many oriental manuscripts the archbishop gave to the library, and is said to be the first Indian manuscript to have arrived in a western collec tion. The manuscript consists of eighteen illustrations of musical modes or ra¯ gas, twelve pictures of unrelated subjects, and ninety-nine pages of calligraphy, a few seemingly selected for their subject matter but many in cluded for their artistry. The manuscript is a muraqqa’, a type of bound album developed in Persia that inter sperses paintings with pages of calligraphy.12 The abundance of Ra¯ gama¯ la¯ pages in the Laud Album suggests they originally belonged to a com plete Ra¯ gama¯ la¯ series like the roughly contemporaneous Chunar (1591), Chawand (1605), and Manley (ca. 1605– 1615) Ra¯ gama¯ la¯s. The Ra¯ gama¯ la¯ pages stand apart from the album’s other paintings in their stylistic and thematic consistency and as a group of related images. Whereas the heroes and heroines of the Laud Album’s mis cellaneous pages mostly wear Mughal dress, those of the Ra¯ gama¯ la¯ pages have Vaishnavite tilakas (sectarian marks), the women wear Rajput dress, and four of the eight fully visible men’s ja¯ ma¯s (upper garments) are tied to the left in the Rajput manner (Bhibha¯s Ra¯ ginı¯, Kanhara Ra¯ ginı¯, Na¯t˙a Ra¯ ginı¯, Vasant Ra¯ ginı¯).13 The Hindu and na¯ yika¯ bheda (types of heroine) iconography of the Ra¯ gama¯ la¯ pages reinforces their cultural dissimi larity from the album’s otherwise Mughal- and Persian style contents. It seems likely that the eighteen Ra¯ gama¯ la¯ pages were excerpted from an earlier Ra¯ gama¯ la¯ series (for which the kha¯ kas had been produced) and inter spersed in the muraqqa’.

Artists have used pouncing to transfer compositions in many cultures, but Mughal and Rajput artists proba bly inherited the technique from Persia. David Roxburgh describes several types of artifact that resulted from Per sian pouncing processes.14 Often the Persian artist placed a drawing over a piece of paper and pricked a sharp stylus through its lines to transfer its composition to the paper beneath. He then connected the pricks on the underlying paper. This process resulted in a drawing full of holes and a second sheet bearing a combination of holes and indentations (where the stylus didn’t fully penetrate the second sheet). Neither page was dirtied by charcoal. A second method entailed placing a nearly transparent piece of paper or deerskin over a drawing and pricking along the contours that showed through. The pricked tracing sheet was then placed over a blank paper, and the artist tapped a mesh bag full of charcoal or chalk powder over its holes to transmit a trail of dots to the sheet below. This process left three types of arti fact: the initial drawing now bearing indentations from the pricking of the superimposed kha¯ ka; the kha¯ ka or a semitransparent sheet full of holes, darkened by charcoal powder; and a sheet with tiny charcoal dots sometimes subsequently connected by lines.

The kha¯ kas that relate to the Ra¯ gama¯ la¯ pages in the Laud Ra¯ gama¯ la¯ Album (henceforth the Ra¯ gama¯ la¯ kha¯ kas) do not exactly follow from either of these pro cesses. Their compositions were outlined in tiny, closely spaced holes more delicately precise than is found on any other kha¯ ka in the Bikaner Usta collection or on 

Fig. 7. Gun˙akalı¯ Ra¯ ginı¯. Author’s reversed drawing connecting dots on printed photograph of Gunakalı¯ Ra¯ ginı¯ kha¯ ka. Original reproduced in Figure 2

any kha¯ ka this author has seen. No lines connect the holes, but one side of each has been pounced in char coal. They are like the second type of pounce Roxburgh describes except that the pages, while very thin, do not seem ever to have been transparent. The Usta collection includes several early tracing papers, and they are dis tinctly different from the paper used for the Ra¯ gama¯ la¯ kha¯ kas. It is almost as if the  artist had drawn in tiny holes. (I am able to ‘‘draw’’ in holes, but find it an awkward and tedious way to compose, so I doubt it was the artist’s method.) The Usta Ra¯ gama¯ la¯ kha¯ kas are not exceptions: a number of early kha¯ kas in the Usta collection are of holes without lines. No related drawing is known for any of these kha¯ kas to suggest they were made from drawings pricked through to the paper beneath. Only Bikaner kha¯ kas of later types of subject matter and in later styles mix lines with holes, and then consistently, as if a change in practice had transpired. Precisely how these kha¯ kas were made and why remains elusive. Though kha¯ kas make multiples possible, and were used at other courts such as Bundi to recycle compositions, Bikaner’s artists do not seem to have relied on existing kha¯ kas to repeat composi tions. At Bikaner, kha¯ kas may have been produced for

Fig. 8. Gun˙akalı¯ Ra¯ ginı¯. Attributed to Fazl, workshop of Abdul Rahim, early 17th c. Opaque watercolor and gold on paper (wasli), page 38   24.6 cm. Bodleian Library, Oxford, MS. Laud Or. 149 fol. 8a.

just one set of paintings (in this case, the paintings in the Laud Ra¯ gama¯ la¯ Album). It is possible that kha¯ kas were included in the production process partly to record compositions. Once a finished painting left the work shop, painters were unlikely to see it again. Thus, sketches, drawings, and kha¯kas, made in the process of developing a finished painting, were probably treasured as invaluable documents of workshop production.

The three Usta kha¯ kas are in fragile condition, with their edges flaked away. Each is a nearly exact model for its corresponding page in the Laud Album, except that two contain significant additional details. In the Gun˙akalı¯ Ra¯ ginı¯, these include a panel door, which closes in the pavilion; a wall with small niches, which extends past the heroine’s pavilion, filling the back left quadrant of the page; and an awning, which shades the space where the heroine sits (Figs. 7, 8). The flask

Fig. 9. Vasanta Ra¯ ginı¯. Author’s reversed drawing connecting dots on printed photograph of Vasanta Ra¯ ginı¯ kha¯ ka. Original reproduced in Figure 3.

behind her was originally a ewer without a handle, and two shallow bowls initially rested to either side of it.15 The kha¯ ka for the Hin˙d˙ola Ra¯ ga is nearly identical to its counterpart in the album (Figs. 5, 6). However the Vasanta Ra¯ ginı¯ kha¯ ka contains several important details left out of the final image, such as two trees framing the dancers, a pool of lotuses at their feet, rain streaming down from above, and a blossoming mango branch in Krishna’s upturned hand (Figs. 9, 10).

Holes may seem to offer little for the connoisseur’s intuition to grasp, but the high quality of the paper used for the kha¯ kas, the rare delicacy of their workman ship, the fashions worn by the figures, and the style of the lines the holes trace firmly associate them with early-seventeenth-century paintings, some of which, like the Berlin Ra¯ gama¯ la¯ discussed below, are dated in reli able colophons. Therefore, I feel as confident about assigning these kha¯ kas an early-seventeenth-century date as I would about dating paintings from this era on the basis of style.

Several details suggest the Laud Album paintings were finished by an artist other than the master who produced the kha¯ kas. First, the disparities in quality and detail between the kha¯ kas and the paintings indi cate the paintings were done by a painter who was not

Fig. 10. Vasanta Ra¯ ginı¯. Attributed to Fazl, workshop of Abdul Rahim, early 17th c. Opaque watercolor and gold on paper (wasli), page 38   24.6 cm. Bodleian Library, Oxford, MS. Laud Or. 149 fol. 66b.

committed to the kha¯ kas’ original ambitions, and who may have misunderstood some of their details. One can imagine, for example, how a second artist looking at the Vasanta Ra¯ ginı¯ kha¯ ka might have left out the long bumpy object in Krishna’s hand (a budding mango branch), perhaps because he did not know what it was. Meanwhile, the faces in the kha¯ kas seem less idio syncratic than those in the paintings: they are not as squared and have less prominent eyes and chins. Finally, the painter has given the hero of his Hin˙d˙ola Ra¯ ga a moustache and a chakda¯r ja¯ ma¯ (four-pointed robe) absent in the corresponding kha¯ ka. It was not un common to alter a transferred composition in the pro cess of working it up into a painting, yet a number of these changes read more like misreading or redirect ing than strategic simplification. None is proof that the kha¯ kas and the paintings are by two different artists, but further evidence will support the two-artist theory. 

If two different artists produced the kha¯ kas and the paintings, how are we to infer which one preceded the other? Within the space of about a decade, might other kha¯ kas have been produced for or from the Laud Album compositions, forming the basis for paintings from which these kha¯ kas were produced, with these kha¯ kas then being used, in turn, for a now-lost manuscript? Such is a more complicated and to my mind less likely scenario, and it would still link Abdul Rahim’s workshop to Bikaner, if more circuitously. In any case, Abdul Rahim and the Bikaner royal family turn out to be connected in too many other ways to dismiss.

b. Scholarship

Until a decade ago, the origins of the Laud Album were unknown. Karl Khandalavala argued it was pro duced in the Deccan, Hermann Goetz placed it at Amber, and several scholars have described it as ‘‘pro vincial Mughal’’ or ‘‘subimperial.’’16 Most recently, John Seyller’s arguments for attributing the manuscript to the workshop of the Kha¯nkha¯na¯n Abdul Rahim (1556– 1626) seemed to lay the question to rest. Seyller located a painter’s inscription in the Laud Album at the bottom of a picture of entertainers, which reads ‘‘‘amal-i Kala Pahara’’: work of Kala Pahari. Paintings in the same style in the Kha¯nkha¯na¯n’s illustrated Ra¯ ma¯ yan˙a also bear inscriptions to Kala Pahara: the artist is certainly the same. Seyller spots other clues to the manuscript’s provenance. The Laud Album borders, for instance, resemble borders produced in Abdul Rahim’s work shop.17

On the basis of style, Seyller attributes all but one of the Ra¯ gama¯ la¯ paintings to Abdul Rahim’s artist Fazl, whose name appears on many pages of the Kha¯nkha¯na¯n’s manuscripts, particularly of his Ra¯ ma¯ yan˙a and Razm na¯ ma. Seyller describes the ‘‘dark-skinned male’’ with the ‘‘strong brow and nose, dark hair and sideburns, and flaring mustache’’ as ‘‘characteristic of Fazl’s figures.’’18 Also typical of Fazl’s hand, according to Seyller, are his rocks, with their ‘‘concentric rings of wash and line’’ and the ‘‘unusual spade-shaped top and striped trunk of the palm tree in the upper right’’ of the Laud Album Na¯t˙a Ra¯ ginı¯ page.19

The attribution to Fazl is persuasive. Stylistically, paintings bearing Fazl’s name in the Freer Ra¯ ma¯ yan˙a are not a close match, but the figure types in Fazl’s later Razmna¯ ma paintings are very similar, and the treatment of foliage and clothing is, in some cases, identical. A dis tinctive turban, its folds heavily outlined, recurs in both the Laud Album and in Fazl’s Razmna¯ ma pages, as does a three-pointed gold crown surmounted by disks. Fazl’s quick, almost scratchy shading of folds, like sheaths of a springy grass, and hands that seem constructed from cones of stiff paper appear throughout the Laud Album Ra¯ gama¯ la¯ pages. Fazl was not an elegant painter, and his energetic awkwardnesses stand out in Abdul Rahim’s manuscripts. His moustaches are like steel brushes. He often employs double lines around eyes, rendering them heavy, and the outline of his sharp-tipped noses bends back into a nostril like the head of an old fashioned pin, all traits found in the Laud Album. Sita lying at Lakshmana’s feet on the ground of one Razmna¯ ma page ascribed to Fazl wears the dress of the Laud Album Ra¯ gama¯ la¯ heroines: their amulet-strung armbands, gold beads, and bowed anklets as well as lehan˙gas (skirts) spilling at the front with a white od˙hnı¯ (or dam˙ r˙iya¯ , as Abul Fazl called the long scarf), striped with alternating scalloped and straight lines and with delicate red criss crossed bands.20 That Fazl’s Razmna¯ ma pages resemble the Laud Album Ra¯ gama¯ la¯ paintings far more than his Ra¯ ma¯ yan˙a pages suggests the Ra¯ gama¯ la¯ paintings were made closer to 1616, when the Razmna¯ ma was pro duced, than 1605, when a dated page indicates Abdul Rahim’s Ra¯ ma¯ yan˙a was completed.21

Yet there are also subtle differences between the Laud Album pages and Fazl’s ascribed work. Each of the Laud Album Ra¯ gama¯ la¯ heroines has a delicate arch of darker paint curling over her belly button, and a shaded line rolls over the chins of the Laud heroes and heroines. The Laud Album chins are fuller and rounder, eyes tend to be larger, faces longer, and outlines heavier, though the differences are subtle. The stylizations are also possibly more consistent in the Laud Album pages than in Fazl’s other work: is it possible that Fazl was adjusting and unifying his style for this project? This is a question to which we shall return shortly, but the visual evidence overwhelmingly supports Seyller’s attri bution of the Laud Album Ra¯ gama¯ la¯ pages to Fazl.

c. Abdul Rahim’s and Raja Rai Singh’s Painters

If the painted Ra¯ gama¯ la¯ pages are a product of Abdul Rahim’s workshop, what are we to make of find ing kha¯ kas with compositions that match them in what was recently the Bikaner Usta family collection?

There is abundant evidence that Abdul Rahim knew Raja Rai Singh, the ruler of Bikaner from 1541 to 1612. In 1592, Akbar sent Raja Rai Singh to assist Abdul Rahim in Thatta (Sind), and in 1593, the two men fought together under Prince Murad in the Deccan. In 1586 and then again from 1604 to 1611, Raja Rai Singh served as the s˙u¯ bahda¯r (governor) of Burhanpur, one of Abdul Rahim’s principal residences, where later, in 1614, the latter built a garden and mansion filled with murals.22 Seyller has noted an inscription on one of Abdul Rahim’s paintings stating it was made in Burhanpur, so the Mughal commander seems to have patronized painting there as well.23 At the very least, the two noble men were living in Burhanpur simultaneously from 1604 until 1607, when Abdul Rahim is said to have briefly left Burhanpur to pay his respects to Emperor Jahangir, and probably for several years afterwards.24

A fair amount is known about Abdul Rahim’s painters. Seyller discusses those named in the pages of the nobleman’s illustrated manuscripts, including Fazl, Qasim, Govardhana, Syama Sundara, Mohana, and Ghulam Ali. Others are noted in the 1615 Ma‘a¯s˙¯ır iRah˙¯ımı¯: Mawlana Ibrahim Naqqash, a painter, callig rapher, illuminator, and poet as well as the supervisor of Abdul Rahim’s library; Mawlana Mushfiq; Madhava, a Hindu; the Rajput princes Nadim and Fahim from Sirohi; and Bihbud. The Ma‘a¯s˙¯ır-iRah˙¯ımı¯ describes Abdul Rahim’s close supervision of these artists, and names several as wonders of their age, though this was a generic rhetorical statement. Among the workshop’s pro ductions are the aforementioned dispersed Razmna¯ ma and a Ra¯ ma¯ yan˙a now in the Freer Gallery of Art.25 In the style now broadly called ‘‘subimperial,’’ the illus trations in these manuscripts resemble paintings from Akbar’s court but are less polished and would have been somewhat outmoded.

We know less about Raja Rai Singh’s painters. According to the Ustas’ living descendants, the family hailed from Herat and settled in Multan in the early sixteenth century. At least two branches of the family relate that Raja Rai Singh brought Usta artisans from Multan after having served as governor of Lahore. According to family lore, Raja Rai Singh invited them to help build and adorn his Junagadh Fort.26

The Usta family genealogy, which Davis has pub lished, names two artists whom scholars know to have worked for the Bikaner royal family in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries: Shah Muhammad and his nephew or son Nur Muhammad.27 (The family genealogy that Davis published relates them as uncle and nephew, but two early-seventeenth-century inscriptions identify Nur Muhammad as Shah Muhammad’s son.) Shah Muhammad’s work is unknown, but a portrait of him, labeled ‘‘Bara [the Elder] Shah Muhammad ji,’’ formerly in the Khajanchi collection, may have been made in his lifetime.28 The drawing pictures him as an old man with a long mullah-like beard and the slightly grumpy ex pression of a venerated elder. He holds a gaz (measuring stick) in one hand, signaling he was the gazada¯r, or head of the workshop, and his ja¯ ma¯ and kat˙a¯r (dagger) make a gentleman of him.29 Dates associated with Nur Muhammad suggest Shah Muhammad was a working adult in the late sixteenth century. If this Shah Muham mad is, indeed, the same artist who contributed a page to the 1585 Tı¯mu¯rna¯ ma, then he would have been at least twenty in 1585, making him about seventy-five to eighty years old in 1640, and the drawing could date to around that time.30

Most of the Usta collection is in a range of related Bikaner idioms. However, a number of the earliest works look Mughal, suggesting that the Bikaner workshop originated with Mughal-trained painters. For example, an unpublished Mughal-style painting with a Persian inflection, also from the Usta collection, is in the style of works from Shah Muhammad’s period. Picturing a prince with attendants, its figures are delicately limned and turn in Persianate, three-quarter view. Two pairs of cypress trees behind the palace and a pair of blue limned hares on the back of the ¯ıwa¯ n (vaulted hall) directly quote a well-known painting by the Persian painter Farrukh Beg, possibly made when he was work ing in Kabul for Akbar’s half brother Muhammad Hakim.31 Might Shah Muhammad or one of his cousins have worked in Kabul as well?32

Akbar-era paintings in the Bikaner palace collection probably came into royal hands under Raja Rai Singh, but it would have been the Ustas who brought their Mughal-style drawings to Bikaner.33 One such drawing is of an angel, seated on a rock; another is a fragment of boats floating on the water; a third pictures two wise men conferring outside a cave.34 A fragmentary kha¯ ka, apparently for the top portion of a vertical composi tion, delineates in tiny holes a Mughal-style landscape of mountains, trees, and distant towns and temples.

More is known about Nur Muhammad. A lengthy Persian inscription on a portrait of a Rajput nobleman bearing the Bikaner palace stamp identifies Nur Muham mad as its artist, dates the painting to 1606, and names the subject ‘‘Rao Bhoj Rathor’’ (Fig. 11).35 It further states that the painting was made for Raja Rai Singh’s son Prince (Kunwar) Surat Singh and that it was pro duced in Bikaner. Joachim Bautze has recently deter mined that, though the inscription calls him a Rathor, the man pictured was Rao Bhoj Singh Hara of Bundi (r. 1585–1607), because he is identified as such on another version of Nur Muhammad’s portrait, which also bears a Bikaner palace stamp. The distinctive face recurs in a couple of Bundi paintings.36 Bhoj Singh is framed within a cusped arch richly decorated with Per sianate arabesques. Eschewing idealism, Nur Muham mad pictured Bhoj Singh with a hawk’s nose, sharp chin, long face, furrowed jaw, and authoritative frown.

 Fig. 12. Portrait of Kunwar Surat (Suraj or Sur) Singh. Bikaner, ca. 1611–1613. Opaque watercolor and gold on paper (wasli), 20.5   13.4 cm. Catherine and Ralph Benkaim Collection.

An inscription along the bottom of a battle scene in the Goenka collection also names Nur Muhammad, and mentions Prince Surat Singh and Bikaner.37 The colors are Mughal, the patterns Persianate, the liveliness Akbari,

Fig. 11. Portrait of Rao Bhoj Singh of Bundi. Inscribed Nur Muhammad, dated 1606. Opaque watercolor and gold on paper (wasli), page 26.4   18 cm, Gursharan and Elvira Sidhu Collection.

The pattern of scallops along the hem of the ruler’s robe and a certain simplicity of outline place the painting more in what scholars call the ‘‘subimperial’’ than the fully imperial mode. but the craftsmanship is not imperial. Evidently, Prince Surat Singh’s artist Nur Muhammad was producing paintings in a somewhat unpolished variant on the late sixteenth-century Mughal style.38

Catherine Glynn has drawn my attention to at least one other artist working in a Mughal-derived style for the Bikaner royal family in this early period.39 In a painting that bears a Bikaner palace stamp on its verso, the artist produced a skillfully rendered, almost Mughal style portrait of Kunwar Surat Singh, whom its inscription

Fig. 13. Yashoda Scolds Krishna, from a dispersed Bha¯ gavata pura¯ n˙a. Bikaner, early 17th c. Opaque watercolor and gold on paper (wasli), 17.2   24.6 cm. Art Institute of Chicago, 2007.384.

identifies by his nickname ‘‘Sur’’ (Fig. 12).40 The indi viduation and shading are Mughal, but the eye, though delicately limned, is the idealized Rajput lotus, a perfect petal turned out to the side. It is not Nur Muhammad’s work.

Meanwhile, paintings illustrating Hindu courtly themes and drawing on ‘‘pre-Mughal’’ painting conven tions were almost certainly also produced at Bikaner. Most scholars assume an early-seventeenth-century illus trated Bha¯ gavatapura¯ n˙a (e.g., Figs. 13, 19, 21, 23) to be Bikaneri, both because it bears Bikaner palace stamps, and because it is a plausible stylistic precursor to later Bikaner painting.41 Gentle pinks, yellows, and greens, together with a Mughal regularity of figural and facial proportions relate to the Mughal idiom Nur Muham mad was practicing, but hotter colors, the consistent use of profile, and ‘‘pre-Mughal’’ conventions like the horizontal format, the use of red frames, and the arched, wavy, white lines of sky derive from a different stylistic mode.

As yet, there is no good term for this mode. ‘‘Pre Mughal’’ suggests archaism, but these conventions re mained current at the Rajput courts well into the nine teenth century; ‘‘Indic’’ sets up ‘‘Mughal,’’ in contrast, as foreign, which it was not; and ‘‘Rajput’’ would be reductive, because Rajput patrons patronized this and Mughal stylistic modes, often in combination. In addi tion, imperial Mughal paintings also sometimes dipped into this mode, a strategy it is difficult to discuss if the conventions are labeled ‘‘Rajput.’’ For now, I propose to use the term ‘‘ma¯rga,’’ a Sanskrit word that denotes ‘‘universal’’ as opposed to ‘‘local’’ traditions to describe pictorial elements that were widely associated with pre Mughal painting, that did not derive from the Islamicate world, and that were typically associated with Hindu religious and court subject matter, particularly with tales of lovers. These elements included compartmentaliza tion of frequently off-center compositions; horizontal pages; areas that were strategically left empty and often framed or semi-framed; an almost exclusive use of pro file; graphically simplified skies, comprising wavy lines and washes; a preference for bold, warm, unmodulated colors; and internally framed areas of solid, intense red. This cluster of long-persisting, transregional, ‘‘pre Mughal’’ pictorial strategies continued to recur in a wide range of ‘‘desi’’ or local styles well into the nine teenth century, though only a few of these conventions typically sufficed in a painting to allude to the ‘‘ma¯rga’’ tradition. To the extent that these conventions tran scended distinctions among ‘‘desi’’ styles (for example, the Bundi or Mewar style), they seem to fit the defini tion of ma¯rga as it was used in literature. Furthermore, because the word ma¯rga typically referred to Indian cosmopolitan literature, it associates these pictorial con ventions with the texts they were developed to illustrate. Finally, ma¯rga implies consciousness of the status these conventions held in a wider pictorial universe that en compassed Persian, European, and the evolving Mughal traditions.42

At least two types of painting would then have been produced at Bikaner in the early 1600s: illustrations using ma¯rga conventions, and historical scenes and portraits in a Mughal-looking idiom. How do the Ra¯ gama¯ la¯ kha¯ kas relate to these two modes of painting? As sug gested earlier, the kha¯ kas do not seem to be in Fazl’s style. They do, however, combine ma¯rga conventions, like the consistent use of profile, with Mughal propor tions and delicacy. They could well have been made by Nur Muhammad (Fig. 11), though the artist of the Surat Singh portrait (Fig. 12) is as good a candidate, because the kha¯ kas, though clearly in an early Mughal-related idiom, lack stylistic idiosyncrasies on which to hang an attribution to an individual master. The kha¯ kas also share a number of qualities with the illustrated Bha¯ ga vatapura¯ n˙a (Fig. 13). In both, figures tend to float, and architectural settings appear to one side of the page, extending beyond the frame. These settings typically feature slender columns and flat roofs around a box like space. Even without their provenance in the Usta collection, on stylistic grounds, Bikaner would have been a plausible place of origin for the kha¯ kas.

What helps most in determining the relationship be tween the kha¯ kas and the Laud Album Ra¯ gama¯ la¯ paint ings, however, is subject matter: the Ra¯ gama¯ la¯ . The iconography of the Laud Album Ra¯ gama¯ la¯ follows what Klaus Ebeling has termed the ‘‘Rajasthani Tra dition.’’ It recurs in many major Rajput Ra¯ gama¯ la¯s of the time, including the Chunar, Chawand, and Manley Ra¯ gama¯ la¯s.43 To date, no imperial Mughal Ra¯ gama¯ la¯ paintings from this period are known. In the following pages, the Ra¯ gama¯ la¯ kha¯ kas and additional works in the Usta family collection will be examined to suggest that the Bikaner royal family was a major source of Ra¯ gama¯ la¯s, and that a number of early-seventeenth century Ra¯ gama¯ la¯s, possibly including the Manley Ra¯- gama¯ la¯ , were produced for Raja Rai Singh or his son Kunwar Surat Singh. The compositions in the kha¯ kas closely resemble the compositions in these Ra¯ gama¯ la¯s, so that the kha¯ kas fit in with the productions of the Bikaner workshop. It makes sense, therefore, that the compositions originated in Bikaner rather than in Abdul Rahim’s workshop, even if Abdul Rahim’s painter pro duced the final paintings. The Chunar Ra¯ gama¯ la¯ will also enter an emerging picture of fellow noblemen, joined by family and political allegiances, sharing paint ings and iconography in a social network of painting and music enthusiasts. In this network, Raja Rai Singh would have been an obvious source of Ra¯ gama¯ la¯ com positions for Abdul Rahim.

d. Ra¯gama¯la¯ Painting

Between 1591 and about 1615, Ra¯ gama¯ la¯s became a favorite subject for illustration among Rajput patrons. The term ra¯ ga, which means ‘‘color’’ or ‘‘passion,’’ de notes a musical mode.44 A relationship between musical modes and aesthetic moods dates back to the fifth century Na¯t˙yas´ a¯stra, though that text did not use the term. Ra¯ gas seem to have originated late in the first millennium of the Common Era, and the ra¯ ga-ra¯ ginı¯ system developed between the thirteenth and sixteenth centuries. This system organized musical modes into six ra¯ gas, each with wives called ra¯ ginı¯s, and, over time, came sometimes to include eight or nine sons or ra¯ gapu tras, themselves sometimes married. By the 1400s, ra¯ gas were being associated with verses about heroes and heroines and with times of the day and seasons. The musicologist Katherine Butler Schofield writes:

Gradually the North Indian Ra¯ gas collected a host of aesthetic properties by which they were differentiated, including the times and seasons of their performance, associations with deities and moods, purported magical properties, and so on.

The most intriguing manifestation of this procedure was the Ra¯ gama¯ la¯ , iconographical depictions of the Ra¯ gas and Ra¯ ginı¯s as heroes, heroines, and deities in verse and painting from the fourteenth century onwards—although there is no known connection between the iconographical and musical aspects of the Ra¯ gas.45

Musicologists speculate that by 1600, when Ra¯ ga ma¯ la¯s began frequently to be illustrated, they were more about the idea of knowing music than about the practice of music. That is, musicians were probably not referring to Ra¯ gama¯ la¯ verses and illustrations when they performed, and the Ra¯ gama¯ la¯ ’s poetic and pictorial dimensions may have been valued, instead, primarily as a form of elite knowledge, a sign of the courtier’s taste for music, and an attribute of the gentleman patron.46

Before the late fifteenth century, it seems that Ra¯ ga ma¯ la¯s were rarely illustrated. The iconography in one of the only fifteenth-century examples, a Jain Ra¯ gama¯ la¯ and the iconography of the Deccani Ra¯ gama¯ la¯ tradition, which arose in the later 1500s, was also distinct from that which would soon flourish at the Rajput courts in Rajasthan, though the fact of the Deccan’s illustrated Ra¯ gama¯ la¯s probably inspired Rajput patrons.47 Several illustrated series, which are thought to have been pro duced in the Rajasthan region, date what would become the standard Rajasthani iconography to the early to mid-sixteenth century. For example, a Bhairavı¯ Ra¯ ginı¯ from that time, purportedly acquired in Pratapgarh (Mewar), plays her man˜ jı¯ra (hand cymbals) in front of an enshrined lin˙ga in a composition that would denote Bhairavı¯ Ra¯ ginı¯ in the region for centuries to come. Two more illustrated Ra¯ gama¯ la¯s, in a roughly mid sixteenth-century style, one published by Norman Brown in 1948, the other, in the Bharat Kala Bhavan in Vara nasi, contain much of what would become Rajasthan’s Ra¯ gama¯ la¯ iconography.48 This iconography therefore decidedly predated the Mughals.

By the 1590s, Mughal painting seems to have begun inspiring Rajput patrons to retain their own painters, and one of the first types of illustrated series that Rajput patrons then began to commission was the illustrated Ra¯ gama¯ la¯ . The Chunar, Chawand, Manley, and Laud Album Ra¯ gama¯ la¯s are the best known and most exten sively intact of these early Ra¯ gama¯ la¯s, but many other Ra¯ gama¯ la¯ pages in similar styles attest to the Ra¯ gama¯ la¯ ’s efflorescence between about 1590 and 1620. The script on these paintings, when it is to be found, is usually De vana¯garı¯, implying Rajput patronage.49

Most scholars of Indian painting now believe some of these circa-1600 Ra¯ gama¯ la¯ pages were produced at

Fig. 14. Des´ a¯ kh Ra¯ ginı¯. Bikaner, early 17th c. Opaque watercolor on paper (wasli), approx. 19.5   14.3 cm. Private collection, USA.

Bikaner. A Des´ a¯ kh Ra¯ ginı¯ page, one of the few paint ings in the Usta family collection, supports the case for this supposition (Fig. 14). It pictures three acrobats against a mauve background, which washes into blue toward the top of the page and shifts to green toward the bottom. The borders are uncolored, and a dhya¯ na verse is written above the painting in an elegant, profes sional, black Devana¯garı¯ script with the final words, identifying the ra¯ ginı¯s, in red. The page shares the same borders, black with red script, style, size, and discolored condition as eight dispersed pages of a known Ra¯ ga ma¯ la¯ series.50 The palette of the Bharat Kala Bhavan’s Meghamala¯r page from this series is almost identical to that of the Usta Des´ a¯ kh Ra¯ ginı¯ page, with its wash of mauve resting on a swath of green ground.

These pages from what I will call for convenience here the ‘‘Usta Ra¯ gama¯ la¯ ’’ follow the template employed by the well-known dispersed ‘‘Berlin Ra¯ gama¯ la¯ ,’’ so called because four of its pages are in the Museum fu¨r Asiatische Kunst, Berlin (Fig. 15).51 With a colophon

Fig. 15. Des´ va¯rı¯ Ra¯ ginı¯, page from the Berlin Ra¯ gama¯ la¯ . Bikaner, 1605–1606. Ink and opaque watercolor on paper (wasli), 16.5   11.8 cm. Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1987.417.2.

dating it to 1605 to 1606, the Berlin Ra¯ gama¯ la¯ series also has plain, pale borders and professional, neatly cal ligraphed dhya¯ nas like the Usta Ra¯ gama¯ la¯ pages, except that the Usta Ra¯ gama¯ la¯ dhya¯ nas end in red letters. The backgrounds of the Berlin series are similarly washed with color, the palette is soft with the same mauves, lavenders, watery blues, and celadon greens, and the style is in the same subimperial vein, though the two illustrated series are not by the same artist, and the Berlin Ra¯ gama¯ la¯ is more delicately executed. Quite possibly, the Berlin Ra¯ gama¯ la¯ was painted a generation earlier than the Usta Ra¯ gama¯ la¯ , but more likely the Usta Ra¯ ga ma¯ la¯ was a less important series and was therefore pro duced more quickly. Similar conventions appear in both series, from the curtains that part and swag to either side in the lovers’ pavilions to the architectural styles, textile patterns, and recurring cranes. The composition and palette of the Berlin T˙odi Ra¯ ginı¯ and Usta Ka¯ moda

Fig. 16. Ka¯ moda Ra¯ ginı¯, from the Usta Ra¯ gama¯ la¯ . Attributed here to Bikaner, early 17th c. Opaque watercolor and gold on paper (wasli), image 16.4   12.2 cm. Brooklyn Museum of Art, Anonymous Gift, 79.187.1.

Ra¯ ginı¯ are particularly close: the two images share simi lar cranes, blue skies, and red backgrounds, and in both the heroine holds a similar pose, with their heads turned to the left and away from the direction of their feet (Figs. 16, 17).52

Fig. 17. T odi Ra ̄ ginı ̄, from the Berlin Ra ̄ gama ̄ la ̄ . Attributed to Bikaner, manuscript dated 1605. Opaque watercolor and gold on paper (wasli), Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sangrahalaya.

Several scholars have noted the relationship between these Ra¯ gama¯ la¯s and the Bikaner Bha¯ gavatapura¯ n˙a (Figs. 13; 14–17). Pratapaditya Pal, for example, sug gested decades ago that the Berlin Ra¯ gama¯ la¯ might be from Bikaner when, referring to the red square behind Krishna in that series’s Meghamala¯r, he noted that it ‘‘employs a stylistic cliche´ that seems to stem directly from the earlier Bikaner painting [i.e., the Bha¯ gava tapura¯ n˙a].’’53 Many other comparisons can be made: the women in the Berlin Ra¯ gama¯ la¯ and in several of the Bikaner Bha¯ gavatapura¯ n˙a pages, for example, have similar facial types, with low brows, minnow eyes, and sometimes downturned mouths. All three illustrated series employ a similar range of decorative motifs on a square pavilion typically shifted to one side of the page. All feature quarter lotuses on architectural brackets (dis creetly visible in Fig. 15), while the Berlin Ra¯ gama¯ la¯ and Bha¯ gavatapura¯ n˙a share swaths of hexagons, such as those that sheathe the domes in the Berlin Van˙ga¯ la Ra¯ ginı¯ and the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s Bha¯ ga vatapura¯ n˙a illustration of Krishna and Satyabhama’s wedding.54 Clothing details match: a trefoil pattern appears on the hero’s ja¯ ma¯ in the Berlin Ra¯ gama¯ la¯ and on Krishna’s dhoti in a Bha¯ gavatapura¯ n˙a page from the Goenka collection;55 an identical pattern appears on the breasts of women’s cholı¯s (blouses) in both series (see the pattern on the heroine’s cholı¯ in Figure 15, for exam ple);56 while the od˙hnı¯s flowing down from the women’s waists in the Usta Ra¯ gama¯ la¯ and the Bikaner Bha¯ gava tapura¯ n˙a, are gathered at horizontal intervals in the manner visible in Figure 13. The palette of all three series, which embraces Mughal celadons and lavenders 

Fig. 18. Madhumadhavi Ra¯ gin¯ , from the Manley Ra¯ gama¯ la¯ , c. 1610. Opaque watercolor on paper (wasli). British Museum, 1973,0917,0.6.

and ‘‘pre-Mughal’’ oranges and reds, is strikingly alike. Thus, the discovery of the Des´ a¯ kh page (Fig. 14) in the Usta family collection joins the Bikaner palace stamp on the Bha¯ gavatapura¯ n˙a to strengthen the attribution of the Berlin and Usta Ra¯ gama¯ la¯s and this Bha¯ gavata pura¯ n˙a to Bikaner artists.

The Ra¯ gama¯ la¯ kha¯ kas (Figs. 1–3) also buttress the attribution to Bikaner. The poses and arrangement of the figures in the Usta Vasanta Ra¯ ginı¯ kha¯ ka (and there fore also in the Laud Album Ra¯ gama¯ la¯ pages) are almost identical to those employed in the Usta Ra¯ gama¯ la¯ Vasanta Ra¯ ginı¯, except that the figure of Krishna is flipped and holds a vı¯n˙a¯ and vessel instead of a mango branch.57 The cranes in the Hin˙d˙ola Ra¯ ga kha¯ ka (and the corresponding Laud Album Ra¯ gama¯ la¯ page) feature in the Berlin and Usta Ra¯ gama¯ la¯s, and the architectural setting in the Usta kha¯ ka of Gun˙akalı¯ Ra¯ ginı¯—a square pavilion off to one side—is a standard feature of the Berlin and Usta Ra¯ gama¯ la¯s as well as of the Bikaner Bha¯ gavatapura n˙a.

Fig. 19. Detail of the Wedding of Satyabhama and Krishna, from a dispersed Bha¯ gavatapura¯ n˙a. Bikaner, early 17th c. Opaque watercolor on paper (wasli), 21.3   29.7 cm. Philadelphia Museum of Art, 125th Anniversary Acquisition. Alvin O. Bellak Collection. 2004-149-17.

That Ra¯ gama¯ la¯s were initially a Rajput specialty; that the Mughal emperors, princes, and Muslim mans˙abda¯rswere not, to our knowledge, producing illustrated Ra¯ ga ma¯ la¯s this early; that Ra¯ gama¯ la¯s seem to have been a Bikaner specialty by 1605 to 1606 when the Berlin Ra¯ gama¯ la¯ was produced (almost certainly before the Laud Album was made); and that the Laud Album com positions relate to these Bikaner Ra¯ gama¯ la¯s, underscore the likelihood that the Usta kha¯ kas were, indeed, the source for the Laud Album Ra¯ gama¯ la¯ paintings.

At the risk of digression, one further Ra¯ gama¯ la¯ , the Manley Ra¯ gama¯ la¯ in the British Museum (Fig. 18), begs to be discussed here, because scholars have often noted its affinities with the Laud Album Ra¯ gama¯ la¯ pages.58 I propose here that the Manley Ra¯ gama¯ la¯ was indeed produced by Usta artists or by artists within their milieu. Daniel Ehnbom wrote of the Berlin Ra¯ gama¯ la¯ that it ‘‘is closely related in style to the famous Ra¯ ga ma¯ la¯ of the W. B. Manley Collection now in the British Museum, London.’’59 The Berlin, Usta, and Manley Ra¯ gama¯ la¯s all have the same plain borders and neatly scripted dhya¯ nas, and they share iconography, composi tions, palette, and similar figure and facial styles, though they are not by the same artist. Like the Bikaner Bha¯- gavatapura¯ n˙a, the Manley Ra¯ gama¯ la¯ favors fields of color washing one into the next, a palette rich with cela dons, yellows, mauves, and lavenders, and off-center, square, flat-roofed pavilions with slender pillars and brown chajja¯s (eaves). It stands apart primarily in the extensive elaboration of its settings and in its rejection of the brilliant ‘‘pre-Mughal’’ reds, which are so promi nent in the other Bikaner series discussed here. (Given the overlapping social spheres of Abdul Rahim’s and Raja Rai Singh’s worlds, one should consider, however, whether the manuscript might have been commissioned for a non-Rajput audience who would have shied away from the artificiality of the ma¯rga red. After all, the nasta‘liq inscriptions suggest that the Manley Ra¯ gama¯ la¯ eventually found its way to an owner who preferred the nasta‘liq to the Devana¯garı¯ script.)

A number of identical decorative details recur in both the Manley Ra¯ gama¯ la¯ and the Bikaner Bha¯ gavata pura¯ n˙a. In the Bha¯ gavatapura¯ n˙a, for example, continu ous waves run along the door in a picture of Krishna’s marrying Satyabhama, and a quarter lotus nestles within the lavender bracket beside it (cf. lotuses in Figs. 18 and 19). These waves also wash along the base of the pavilion in the Manley’s Ma¯ lava Ra¯ ginı¯, the top of the brick wall in its Vaira¯rı¯ and Ra¯ mkarı¯ Ra¯ ginı¯s, and above the gate in its Gun˙akarı¯. The quarter lotus in the Bha¯ gavatapura¯ n˙a and the Berlin Ra¯ gama¯ la¯ turns up in the bracket of the Manley’s Madhuma¯ dhavı¯ Ra¯ ginı¯ (Fig. 18). Also similar are the small gold vessels that seem to float about the ground, and the alizarin vase  silhouettes in white wall niches. A red bed, topped by a diagonal yellow bolster, with sheets draped over the bed posts and along the sides exhibits a distinctive pattern of swags in both the Manley Ra¯ gama¯ la¯ and the Bha¯ gava tapura¯ n˙a (Figs. 20, 21). An od˙hnı¯ worn by women in both series falls in horizontal segments, each segment gathered into minute folds (Figs. 13, 18, 19). The two series also share plants: the same irises, for example, and a manner of veining leaves that looks etched.60 This last is a device for foliage that can be traced back to Mughal painting, but there is a striking correspon dence here between the quick, somewhat schematic ren dering of the etched lines in both series. Certain building details are also identical: a beehive pattern of octagons, for example, and fields of hexagons embedded with six pointed stars. A brown pediment that runs above the chajja¯s in each series frames a Mughal-style repeating arch motif and is topped by crenellations decorated with crosses. Again, such elements stem from Mughal art, but a certain tipsy informality in their rendering makes them virtually identical in the Manley Ra¯ gama¯ la¯ and the Bha¯ gavatapura¯ n˙a, even if the former is a more precisely crafted manuscript.61

In his detailed study of Ra¯ gama¯ la¯ painting, Klaus Ebeling observed that the ‘‘majority of [Ra¯ gama¯ la¯] pages’’ of the Laud Album ‘‘are apparently not copied but are visually so close to [the Manley Ra¯ gama¯ la¯] in their human poses, that one can conclude that the maker of one set knew the other set, or that both sets derived from one precursor.’’62 Indeed, the Laud Album and Manley Ra¯ gama¯ la¯s have thirteen ra¯ gas and ra¯ ginı¯s in common. Eleven of these ra¯ gas and ra¯ ginı¯s have the same core iconography, while nine of them use almost identical poses, though a few figures are reversed, and no figure derives from a kha¯ ka used for both manu scripts. Ebeling points to Nat˙a Ra¯ ginı¯ to illustrate the uncanny resemblance between pages of the Manley Ra¯- gama¯ la¯ and Laud Album Ra¯ gama¯ la¯s. The hero and his horse could be, as Ebeling points out, free-hand copies of each other. This likeness extends to the disposition of the horse’s feet, the swag flying back from beneath the horse’s chin, the bent arm of the hero, who clutches his reins with his left hand, and the hero’s right arm, which is raised, sword in hand, to strike down the enemy before him. The slain figure below lies in the same pose in both pictures, neck slashed, broken sword before him. Such correspondences abound in the two manuscripts’ other ra¯ gas and ra¯ ginı¯s as well.

The Manley Ra¯ gama¯ la¯ is also a likely precursor for later Bikaner Ra¯ gama¯ la¯s. A Gun˙akalı¯ Ra¯ ginı¯, ascribed to the Bikaner master Ruknuddin, essentially recreates the Manley’s Gun˙akalı¯ composition (there the inscrip

Fig. 20. Detail of Malas´ri Ra¯ ginı¯, from the Manley Ra¯ gama¯ la¯ . Attributed here to Bikaner, early 17th c., British Museum, 1973,0917,0.18.

tion specifies Gun˙akarı¯), with a pavilion behind the heroine, diagonal bolster across the empty bed, wall beyond and gate to the right.63 In addition, the Manley Van˙ga¯ la Ra¯ ginı¯ seems to be a source for a later seven teenth-century Bikaner Van˙ga¯ la Ra¯ ginı¯ at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and an early-eighteenth-century Bikaner version at the Chazen Museum of Art, Madison, Wisconsin.64 An unusual detail in the Manley Ra¯ gama¯ la¯ , which was not otherwise in circulation in Rajasthan, resurfaces in a mid-seventeenth-century Ra¯ gama¯ la¯ whose style has led scholars to associate it with Bikaner.65 It is the image of the hero of the Manley Ra¯ gama¯ la¯ ’s Keda¯r Ra¯ ginı¯, dressed in a translucent white ja¯ ma¯ and yellow paija¯ mah, who closes his eyes and bows his head before a sage. He reappears as Keda¯r Ra¯ ginı¯, head bowed, eyes closed, and in the same yellow clothes in a page from the later manuscript now in the Museum Rietberg, Zurich.66

If we accept that Bikaner patrons commissioned the Manley Ra¯ gama¯ la¯ , then Bikaner begins to seem to have been, not just a source, but one of the principal sources for Ra¯ gama¯ la¯ paintings around 1600. However, the issue of place must be problematized: in the following, I suggest focusing on the association of ‘‘subimperial’’ paintings with spheres of production and reception rather than on their attribution to fixed locations.

Fig. 21. Detail of Yashoda Scolding Krishna, from a dispersed Bha¯ gavatapura¯ n˙a. Bikaner, early 17th c. Opaque watercolor with gold on paper (wasli), 17.2   24.6 cm. The Art Institute of Chicago, 2007.384.

e. Mobile Styles circa 1600

Abdul Rahim was fond of music, and Raja Rai Singh would have been an obvious person from whom to obtain Ra¯ gama¯ la¯ iconography.67 Exactly how the Ra¯ gama¯ la¯ compositions were transferred, however, is still obscure. Did Raja Rai Singh or his son Kunwar Surat Singh offer pounces from their artists’ Ra¯ gama¯ la¯ kha¯ kas to Abdul Rahim? If so, such a gift would have been highly unusual. Ra¯ gama¯ la¯ images in north India at this time were extensively interrelated, an issue to which I shall return in a moment. However, no identical pages of a ra¯ ga or ra¯ ginı¯ are known. Only at Bundi in this early period were artists reusing ancestral kha¯ kas (the Chunar kha¯ kas) to remake Ra¯ gama¯ la¯ compositions. Bikaner’s artists did not; Bikaner Ra¯ gama¯ la¯s were always variations on one another. At Bikaner, kha¯ kas seem to have been important to the initial production of a work of art and were probably kept as records of a composi tion after the final painting left the workshop, but they were not, to my knowledge, employed to make multi ples. I am intrigued by fairly substantial indications that the Bikaner artists and Abdul Rahim’s artists may sometimes have worked together or in close proximity to one another, which raises the possibility that the kha¯ kas and the final Laud Album Ra¯ gama¯ la¯ paintings, though produced by two different artists primarily working for two different patrons, may not have been produced in two different workshops. 

Fig. 22. Detail showing Bhima from a Razmna¯ ma page, Krishna Pacifies Balarama. Attributed to Fazl, 1616–1617. Opaque watercolor and gold on paper (wasli), 38   23 cm. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Rogers Fund, 55.121.32a.

In addition to iconography, Fazl’s Ra¯ gama¯ la¯ pages in the Laud Album share a suggestive number of pic torial details with the Berlin and Usta Ra¯ gama¯ la¯ . The same abstract washes of color fill their backgrounds, for example, and a pattern of leaves, interspersed with flowers and typically executed in lavender, runs along horizontal elements of buildings in both the Berlin Ra¯- gama¯ la¯ and in Fazl’s Ra¯ gama¯ la¯ .

There are also affinities between Fazl’s Ra¯ gama¯ la¯ paintings and the pages of the Bikaner Bha¯ gavata pura¯ n˙a. Paintings from both sets of illustrations feature a distinctive lemon yellow ambience and reduce back grounds to simple expanses of color. They favor square roofed white buildings with pink and lavender details, brown chajja¯s, and pistachio green roofs. Facial types are similar as well. Heads and features are propor tionally akin and eyes similarly minnow-like. Turbans, often with alizarin folds, are sometimes virtually iden tical.68 Pink-purple stones sprouting green leaves, a Mughal convention, are dispersed through both, like amiable crabs, and in both, long green grasses, the gesture of a single brushstroke, grow from the bases of trees. What is, perhaps, most startling are the shaded lines that loop over Fazl’s distinctly articulated belly buttons: though nowhere to be found in Fazl’s other paintings, they appear in the illustration of Krishna with Putana in the Bikaner Bha¯ gavatapura¯ n˙a.69 Fazl has to have been looking at Rajput Ra¯ gama¯ la¯s to have

Fig. 23. Page from a dispersed Bha¯ gavatapura¯ n˙a. Bikaner, early 17th c. Opaque watercolor and gold on paper (wasli), 17   24.8 cm. Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gift of the Kronos Collection, 1978.535.

arrived at his blue and yellow backgrounds, but perhaps he was familiar with Bikaner painting generally. Bikaner’s Ra¯ gama¯ la¯ painters may equally have known paintings from Abdul Rahim’s workshop. A comparison of details in one of Fazl’s Razmna¯ ma pages and in a Bha¯ gavatapu ra¯ n˙a page finds many of the same affinities (Figs. 22, 23).

Tracing motifs and conventions from one manuscript or illustrated series to the next, a method on which I rely heavily in this article, is tiring and unpleasurable work for a reader to follow, but it is important to acknowledge similarities for which our assumptions do not encourage us to look. Bikaner’s and Abdul Rahim’s painters—working for Rajput and Muslim mans˙abda¯rs— seem unreconcilable, but the conditions of the period do not require them to have been so. Let me add that quite a few related paintings, not discussed here, amplify the impression of an overlap between the Bikaner royal family’s and Abdul Rahim’s workshops: a Rambha S˙ukha Sam˙va¯ d page, for example, that has been asso ciated with Bikaner because of its style, features the same light, squiggling line running along the inside perimeters of its rocks, which, as John Seyller has noted, is characteristically found in Fazl’s Laud Album pages.70

How might such similarities have arisen? Artists like Nur Muhammad traveled. Many of the conventions that recur widely in subimperial paintings followed from the dispersal of painters out of the imperial workshop, particularly after Akbar’s death when Emperor Jahangir

Fig. 24. Saindhavı¯ Ra¯ ginı¯. India, subimperial, c. 1600–1610. Opaque watercolor and gold on paper (wasli), 29.7   22.1 cm. Cleveland Museum of Art, Gift of Natesan Galleries, Ltd., London, 2001.112.

(r. 1605–1627) began winnowing his workshop down to a comparatively small number of masters. Once dis persed, artists journeyed in search of patronage. The inscription that names the ‘‘subimperial’’ master Ustad Salivahana, who worked in a style related to Bikaner’s, reads ‘‘Usta Salivahana,’’ which suggests he was a mem ber of the painter Nur Muhammad’s clan.71 Presumably his style reflected both his family relationships and his Mughal training. It is likely that such painters often did not establish loyalty to one patron. Seyller describes a situation of constant movement and exchange:

[T]he biographies in the Ma‘a¯s˙¯ır-iRah˙¯ımı¯

collectively describe a situation in which an elite group of Mughal patrons—including the imperial family—shuttled poets and calligraphers back and forth among themselves almost as routinely as the valuables and manuscripts they regularly

exchanged.72

Might painters have been ‘‘shuttled’’ like poets and calligraphers? In such a context, can we assume that painters like Nur Muhammad were exclusively dedicated to one patron, or that some of Abdul Rahim’s artists might not have moonlighted elsewhere?

Scholars of Indian painting are accustomed to using style to link paintings to artists, patrons, and places. The mobility I describe here, which was endemic around 1600, made non-imperial paintings of this period often virtually unplaceable, making it a frustrating period for the connoisseur to handle. I doubt any scholar has felt satisfied assigning the vague rubric ‘‘subimperial’’ to a

work of art. It might be argued, however, that patrons encouraged similarities within the broad field of paint ing at the time to create cohesion across the broad ex panses of the empire.73 Certainly it is rare for paintings of this period to include cues to specific locations. More often, a Mughal celadon effaces place to offer, instead, a non-specific Mughal ambience, such as one finds in the portrait of Prince Surat Singh. The result was paintings that made sense anywhere in the empire. Only later, after artists like Nur Muhammad had shifted perma nently to places like Bikaner, Amber, and Bundi, did their descendants begin to forge locally rooted idioms.

The connoisseur’s methods of close looking and comparison are not useless if the scholar assumes one basic fact: for a piece of visual information to appear in two different paintings, the information has to have traveled. Recurring motifs, conventions, palettes, tech niques, iconography, and compositions are the traces of movement and contact. Mostly it is not possible to say what these movements or contacts were, but acknowl edging dispersal can lead to useful new ways of thinking about art of this era.

Take the example of a dispersed subimperial Ra¯ ga ma¯ la¯ series, which has been receiving recent attention (Fig. 24).74 It favors the horizontality and compositional logic of the Bikaner Bha¯ gavatapura¯ n˙a, a Bikaner palette keyed up a notch and shifted a degree toward the visionary, Bikaner’s plain Ra¯ gama¯ la¯ borders with their neat text, and Bikaner/Abdul Rahim figure and facial types. The mix is overlaid with a layer of teeming orna ment, in which patterns, blue flowers, turning branches, ripening fruit, lotuses, and swirling water buzz as on a hot day in spring after a drenching rain. It both is and is not like the manuscripts we have been examining. It is tempting to call it Bikaneri, for here, again, is the triangular roof and the ciqs (screens) of the Bikaner Bha¯ gavatapura¯ n˙a, the scrolling vine motif of the Berlin Ra¯ gama¯ la¯ and the Laud Album, and the architectural framing so typical of contemporaneous Bikaner works generally. However, the extravagance of this illustrated series is more Deccani in character. Indeed, Robert Skelton notes that the Sanskrit text it illustrates, Kshe makarna’s Ra¯ gama¯ la¯ treatise, became popular in the Deccan.75

Rather than place this illustrated series, might we associate it with a Raja Rai Singh–Abdul Rahim/Deccan sphere of production?76 Its wild decorations and hot colors read like a unique, excited confluence of ma¯rga, Bikaneri, Persian, Mughal, and Deccani painting: warm Indic yellow and orange, Persianate turquoise, Deccani skies, Mughal faces, and the cranes favored in Raja Rai Singh’s and Abdul Rahim’s paintings. The Birla

Fig. 25. Vaira¯rı¯ Ra¯ ginı¯, from the Laud Ra¯ gama¯ la¯ Album. Attributed to Fazl, early 17th c. Opaque watercolor and gold on paper, page 38   24.6 cm. Bodleian Library, Oxford, MS. Laud Or. 149, fol. 40b.

artists in the Deccan for a Hindu patron like Raja Rai Singh, who, as a Mughal administrator, would have been able to read Persian, as we know from the Persian inscriptions on the Bikaner painter Nur Muhammad’s works. Both patrons had family members who may themselves have patronized paintings. Raja Rai Singh’s son Dulip quite probably commissioned paintings when he was in the Deccan, too.77 Wherever they were pro duced, these paintings are a mix, which may only make sense if we look for conversations among patrons and painters who were brought together, here and there, on Mughal assignment. Rather than place such paintings, perhaps we can, instead, work toward identifying them with specifiable social spheres in the mobile society of the Mughal empire’s mans˙abda¯rs.

f. Friendship

Pictorial information traveled through circulating paintings, painters, and patrons. A key challenge of studying this era is determining which kinds of circulat ing we are seeing. I would like to broaden the ‘‘sphere’’ of circulation slightly, still focusing on Ra¯ gama¯ la¯s, more precisely to contextualize the Raja Rai Singh–Abdul Rahim connection.

Thus far the Ra¯ gama¯ la¯s I have examined have been iconographically and stylistically linked. Ra¯ gama¯ la¯s pro duced around 1600 were almost all iconographically linked, but not always so closely connected stylistically.

Razmna¯ ma, too, which has markedly similar colors, stylistic mannerisms, and buzzingly verdant backgrounds, probably belongs to the same or, at least, an overlap ping sphere of production. The Razmna¯ ma also looks like a return to ma¯rga painting by way of the Mughal imperium and the Deccan. In the world of the Mughal mans˙abda¯rs, the Persian and Devana¯garı¯ texts on, respectively, the Birla Razmna¯ ma and Khsemakarna Ra¯ gama¯ la¯ need not indicate different realms of patron age, the Mughal versus the Rajput. Instead, these sets of illustrations could have emerged from similar liminal positions in between disparate pictorial centers. Abdul Rahim was actively patronizing Hindu subject matter; was, we know from the Laud Album, interested in Ra¯ gama¯ la¯ painting; and is said to have read Sanskrit. The Kshemakarna Ra¯ gama¯ la¯ could well have been pro duced for Abdul Rahim or someone like him by artists working for both Muslim and Hindu patrons. Or it and the Birla Razmna¯ ma could have been produced by

Even so, iconographic connections would have followed from some sort of contact and mobility. For example, the iconography, settings, figurations, and compositions in the Chunar Ra¯ gama¯ la¯ (1591), the Chawand Ra¯ gama¯ la¯ (1605), and the Manley Ra¯ gama¯ la¯ (ca. 1605–1615) are alike. Their artists have to have had access to the same visual information. The rocky hills in the backgrounds of their A¯ sa¯ varı¯ Ra¯ ginı¯s are Persianate, a convention that would have appeared in Ra¯ gama¯ la¯ painting during the Mughal era.78 Given the rarity of Ra¯ gama¯ la¯s from before 1591, Persianate rocks probably entered the Ra¯ gama¯ la¯ repertoire around the time the Chunar Ra¯ ga ma¯ la¯ was made—indeed, possibly, through the Chunar Ra¯ gama¯ la¯ . Some sharing here was recent, even rather sudden.

Yet, despite their interconnections, the styles of these three Ra¯ gama¯ la¯s are distinct: the Chunar Ra¯ gama¯ la¯ is stylistically tied to Akbari painting of about 1570 to 1585; the Chawand Ra¯ gama¯ la¯ looks ‘‘pre-Mughal’’; and the Manley Ra¯ gama¯ la¯ has an affinity with the tastes of the early Jahangir era.79 There are several factors at work here, including changing tastes, different work shops, and intentional expressions of cultural affiliation.

The decidedly non-Mughal look of the Chawand Ra¯ ga ma¯ la¯ , for example, is frequently thought to denote the Mewar dynasty’s preference for the idioms of their glory days and/or their symbolic refusal to engage with Mughal culture.80

The amount that is shared between the Chunar and Manley Ra¯ gama¯ la¯s is particularly thought-provoking. A pair of partridges roost in the Manley and Chunar A¯ sa¯ varı¯s’ rocky settings. How did such repetitions come about? The iconography in these illustrated Ra¯ gama¯ la¯s is based on one text, which Ebeling calls Sanskrit Text B, and which was the foundation of the Rajasthani Tra dition, but the visual correlations among these Ra¯ ga ma¯ la¯ series can only have resulted from their patrons or artists exchanging imagery.81

Either Rao Bhoj Singh, who was the Mughal gover nor of Chunar and the Rajput ruler of Bundi, or his son Ratan Singh was the patron of the Chunar Ra¯ gama¯ la¯ , and it is Rao Bhoj Singh who is the subject of the 1606 portrait by the Bikaner artist Nur Muhammad, which was described earlier (Fig. 11).82 Rao Bhoj Singh served with Raja Rai Singh in the Deccan in 1601 and met him again in 1605.83 Thus Nur Muhammad’s portrait links the patron of the 1591 Chunar Ra¯ gama¯ la¯ to the likely patron of the Laud Album Ra¯ gama¯ la¯ compositions. Meanwhile, Abdul Rahim was fighting in the Deccan when Rao Bhoj Singh and Raja Rai Singh were there, and Rao Bhoj Singh’s son Kunwar Ratan Singh would later build Ratanpur near Burhanpur, where Abdul Rahim passed much of his time. Joachim Bautze notes that Rao Bhoj Singh wears Deccani dress in the Nur Muhammad portrait,84 and, indeed, Raja Rai Singh was in Burhanpur in 1606 when Rao Bhoj Singh’s portrait was made, though the inscription states it was made in Bikaner.85

Here then are relationships that potentially explain the similarities between the Ra¯ gama¯ la¯s produced at Chunar and for the Bikaner court. It seems likely that Ra¯ gama¯ la¯s became a social fashion among Rajput and Mughal friends, and that the similarities among Ra¯ ga ma¯ la¯s in this period resulted from the circulation of images among the mans˙abda¯ri elite.

That said, there is a degree of overlap between the paintings produced for Abdul Rahim and for Raja Rai Singh (and/or his son Prince Surat Sigh) that is unique. The Chunar Ra¯ gama¯ la¯ kha¯kas did not leave the Chunar/ Bundi workshop, and while the Manley Ra¯ gama¯ la¯ com positions resemble the Chunar compositions to a strik ing degree, the former contains no exact copies of the latter’s figures. By contrast, the Bikaner kha¯ kas are— save that they are more detailed—identical to the Laud Album compositions, apparent evidence of an unusually close relationship between their patrons. I urge scholars to consider the possibility that Abdul Rahim sometimes shared artists with Raja Rai Singh and his son, and to evaluate further evidence accordingly.

We should probably not imagine that artistic collab orations during this time always had to be formal arrangements. The fluidity with which patrons shared artists and with which artists sought out multiple patrons may have resulted in communications that only seem surprising to us now because of habits of art historical labeling that assume regional styles and fixed allegiances. These habits serve us well for many mid-seventeenth century and later paintings, but do not neatly square with subimperial painting of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. At best, we may only ever be able to identify mobile spheres of intense pictorial exchange among multiple agents.

Before continuing, it is worth recapitulating what has been achieved so far. We have three pieces of paper figured with tiny holes from a collection of workshop materials belonging to the Lalani branch of the Usta clan, which had served the Bikaner court since around 1600 (Figs. 1–3). Their paper, delicate workmanship, the fashions worn by their figures, and their figurative and architectural types are early seventeenth century. Their compositions match in outline, scale, and in most characteristics (though the paintings are less detailed) three pages of the album that the Archbishop Laud gave to the Bodleian Library in 1640 (Figs. 6, 8, 10). However, their style does not match the style of the Laud Album Ra¯ gama¯ la¯ pages, attributed by John Seyller to Abdul Rahim’s artist Fazl. The kha¯ kas were probably produced for the Bikaner royal family by artists work ing for them rather than for Abdul Rahim because: 1) kha¯ kas mostly resided with the artist families who pro duced them; 2) the style of the kha¯ kas is consistent with the style of Bikaner’s first artists who seem to have trained at the Mughal court and who were illustrating typical Hindu court imagery in a hybrid Mughal/ma¯rga style at Bikaner; and 3) Raja Rai Singh and/or his son Kunwar Surat Singh patronized Ra¯ gama¯ la¯ series, where as neither Abdul Rahim nor any other non-Rajput patron is associated with Ra¯ gama¯ la¯ imagery in the early 1600s (other than the Laud Ra¯ gama¯ la¯ pages them selves). The similar color preferences and color juxta positions, decorative motifs, and architectural, figural, and facial types in the Usta kha¯ kas, the Laud Album Ra¯ gama¯ la¯ paintings, the Usta, Berlin, and Manley Ra¯ ga ma¯ la¯s, the Bikaner Bha¯ gavatapura¯ n˙a, and even Abdul Rahim’s Razmna¯ ma suggest the possibility of fairly 

extensive traffic having taken place between the Bikaner royal family’s artists and Abdul Rahim’s artists. One cannot speak of a clear stylistic boundary between the works produced for these two patrons, though most paintings were clearly made for either one or the other. Finally, the kha¯ kas and the pictorial affiliations among Ra¯ gama¯ la¯ paintings in this period encourage us to think about personal relationships among high-ranking Mughal officials—Muslim and Rajput—in our analyses of what we call subimperial painting. Mans˙abda¯ri friendships were probably a significant factor in the constitution of art in this period.

II. Analysis

Thus far, I have attempted to understand what the Bikaner kha¯ kas were and how their compositions ended up in the Laud Album. However, the exchange between Raja Rai Singh and Abdul Rahim and the reuse of a number of Ra¯ gama¯ la¯ pages in a muraqqa‘ now called the Laud Album demands some interpretation. Raja Rai Singh and Abdul Rahim shared one culture—that of the Mughal court—but they were also Rajput/Rajasthani/ Hindu and Persian/Turkic/Muslim, respectively. What did Raja Rai Singh’s Ra¯ gama¯ la¯ mean to Abdul Rahim? The Emperor Akbar’s religious debates, explorations of non-Muslim religious practices, Persian translations of Sanskrit texts, and illustrated Hindu epics were signi ficantly motivated by politics and imperial ideology. By contrast, the encounter between Raja Rai Singh and Abdul Rahim seems to have been more social than political. (Though I do not mean to suggest that social and political impulses are neatly distinguishable.) Unlike, for example, Akbar’s illustrated Harivamsa, the Laud Ra¯ gama¯ la¯ paintings do not aim to educate a Persian speaking audience in Hindu culture; they do not com prise a full series or appear in their original order. Juxtaposed with Arabic and Persian texts and with paintings of other subjects in a type of manuscript that belonged to the Mughal majlis, or assembly of friends, and to its culture of connoisseurship, the Ra¯ gama¯ la¯ images would have taken on new meanings and asso ciations. The final section of this essay interprets the Ra¯ gama¯ la¯ paintings in the pictorial and social context of the murraqa‘. The aim is to consider Muslim respon siveness to ma¯rga culture among subimperial patrons, and to think about whether non-Rajput audiences were a factor in the sudden popularity and even constitution of Ra¯ gama¯ la¯ imagery at this time.

The discovery of the Bikaner kha¯ kas engages with a growing literature in South Asia on historical circula tions of people, objects, traditions, practices, and beliefs. ‘‘Translation’’ is the term now increasingly used to de scribe the processes of cultural negotiation and transcul turation that follow from the mobility of people and their things. Recently, Barry Flood has examined the myriad translations in visual culture that characterized Hindu-Muslim relationships from the eighth to early thirteenth centuries. Flood draws on the sociologist Bruno Latour’s definition of translation as ‘‘an explanatory metaphor and a dynamic practice through which the circulation, mediation, reception, and transformation of distinct cultural forms and practices is effected.’’86 The Bikaner kha¯ kas, Fazl’s Ra¯ gama¯ la¯ paintings, and the sub sequent re-situating of his paintings in the Laud Album focus our attention on such circulations and translations of imagery in the subimperial realm. Confounding, as Flood puts it, ‘‘any attempt to draw hard-and-fast boun daries between cultural formations,’’ they point, I sug gest, to the possibility that translation was the sub imperial condition.87

If we accept that the Ra¯ gama¯ la¯ kha¯ kas were pro duced for Raja Rai Singh or his son Kunwar Surat Singh, then Fazl’s paintings are not simply Ra¯ gama¯ la¯ illustrations but responses to—and translations of— existing Ra¯ gama¯ la¯ imagery in a non-Rajput domain. Fazl made a key gesture toward the conventions of what I am calling the ma¯rga tradition of painting when he imitated its abstracted backgrounds of solid colors, one fading into the next (Figs. 6, 8, 10, 25). The kha¯ kas did not dictate these backgrounds, which means that Fazl chose, of his own accord, to reproduce them. He had to have been conscious of working with an un familiar tradition, because the exclusive use of profile and the focus on one to four characters in the fore ground of each composition would have been new to an artist accustomed to creating Akbari-style composi tions roiling with figures in action and turned in multiple views. The association of stylistic traditions with subject matters (the Persian style for Persian subject matter, for example, or the Mughal style for Mughal subjects) was basic to Mughal and Rajput pictorial thinking. The application at Bikaner of Mughal and ma¯rga conven tions to different types of subject matter was discussed earlier in this essay, and Seyller has noted the use of Persianate conventions for Persian manuscripts in Abdul Rahim’s workshop.88 From this perspective, it would have been a matter of course for Fazl to match a Ra¯ ga ma¯ la¯ with its associated ma¯rga conventions. However, although Abdul Rahim’s Ra¯ ma¯ yan˙a and Razmna¯ ma reference Hindu imagery, stylistically they related more closely to Akbari than to ma¯rga prototypes, making the Laud Album Ra¯ gama¯ la¯ pictures the only known examples of an extensive engagement with the ma¯rga pictorial tradi tion in Abdul Rahim’s workshop.

Fazl’s rounded chins, shaded with a curl, large eyes, arches delineating the bellies of his heroines, and the relative consistency of his figurations were noted earlier as being novelties for Fazl. Even his outlines seem more emphatic, though that may be a trick of the compara tively light backgrounds. It is worth considering whether he was striving for the kind of prototypical, round fleshed ideal, which was a mainstay of ma¯rga painting. It was undoubtedly the invocation of this mode, together with the Ra¯ gama¯ la¯ iconography and Rajput dress, which inspired Hermann Goetz to attribute the paintings to Rajput patronage.89 Were the Ra¯ gama¯ la¯ paintings to have been found outside the Laud Album, they would probably still be classified as early Rajput.

In one key respect Fazl was consistently unfaithful to the Ra¯ gama¯ la¯ , however. Though he observed several iconographic niceties, such as the gold skin of his Nat˙a Ra¯ ginı¯ horseman, he entirely ignored the temporal and seasonal changes so essential to Ra¯ gama¯ la¯ iconography. Not even the rain of Vasanta Ra¯ ginı¯, which is clearly depicted in the kha¯ kas, disrupts his yellow and blue backgrounds (Figs. 9, 10). Together with the extraction of the paintings from their original Ra¯ gama¯ la¯ sequence, this omission of time and weather hints at a non-Rajput engagement with the subject matter inspired by an out sider’s interests in its themes. In relation to the other pages of the Laud Album, the Ra¯ gama¯ la¯ iconography fades into the background, while the muraqqa‘ as a whole brings the more generic themes of music, love, and mystical yearning to the fore.

The Mughal album or muraqqa‘ remains an intrigu ing question mark in the study of Mughal painting, and it is likely to prove key to understanding the Mughal ex perience of art.90 David Roxburgh’s extensive study of the Persian muraqqa‘ describes a format for the making of thoughtful, informed connections among existing works of art.91 A similar kind of art historical thinking was sometimes a feature of the early Mughal muraqqa‘: two facing pages recently published from the Gulshan Album, for example, juxtapose two works by Abdus Samad, each produced for Nauroz (the Persian new year) in half a day, but in different years, above two versions of the same Bihzad composition, in an arrangement that appears to be more about the making and history of art than its iconographic content.92 The assembly of such albums was an art in its own right.

The Laud Album was not as orchestrated as an imperial Mughal album, and careful study remains to determine whether it is now bound in its original arrange ment.93 Even so, the Laud Album is not bereft of mean ingful parallels or thematic coherence. On four pairs of opposing pages, for example, the same verse is repeated twice, once on each page, to invite a comparison of calligraphic execution. Meanwhile, several thematic and formal relationships link the album’s paintings to one another.

The most obvious theme of the paintings is music. In addition to the eighteen Ra¯ gama¯ la¯ pages, the Laud Album includes a painting of a woman holding a vı¯n˙a¯ (stringed instrument) and a portrait of Zain Khan Khoka, a Mughal nobleman known to have loved ra¯ gas and to have been skilled at playing ‘‘Hindu music.’’94

Female beauty and eroticism are obvious themes, as well. They are two of the principal themes of the Ra¯ ga ma¯ la¯ pages, which dominate because of their numbers, but in addition they play out in pictures of a woman who stretches her arms upwards in a position of yearn ing, exposing her breasts and arching her back (Fig. 26); of a nearly nude beauty wringing out her long hair from a bath; of a woman on a throne, receiving a flower from an infant (Fig. 27); of the na¯ yika¯ with the vı¯n˙a¯ , just mentioned, and of a woman who holds open a box, as if to offer its contents to someone outside the frame.

This implicit association between the Ra¯ gama¯ la¯ heroines and the other women in the album becomes explicit in the first painting, which pictures a scantily clad beauty stretching her arms up and back in a repli cation of the pose taken by Vaira¯rı¯ Ra¯ ginı¯ on a later page (Figs. 25, 26). She wears Rajput dress, including a nearly see-through cholı¯. It is as if Vaira¯rı¯ had been decocted from her iconography to represent distilled eroticism. The woman with the vı¯n˙a¯ is a similar if more subtle decoction, because she is akin to the heroines who carry instruments in the Ra¯ gama¯ la¯ pages but with out their iconographic specificity. To an aficionado of Ra¯ gama¯ la¯s, she resembles a T˙odi Ra¯ ginı¯ without her deer.

While the Laud Album’s seminude bather with the sinuous snake of hair does not relate to the Ra¯ gama¯ la¯ pages, she probably alluded to Sanskrit and/or vernacular sources. Bathing beauties were a subject of Persian paint ings like Muhammad Mumin’s just-bathed odalisque in the Read Album in the Morgan Library & Museum.95 However, bathers wringing their hair often figured in Hindu temple sculpture, and Joan Cummins’s research into later Pahari versions of this image turned up numerous antecedents from Sanskrit and vernacular court poetry, such as the fourteenth-century poet Vidya pati’s ‘‘I saw my love when she was bathing, a stream of water pouring from her hair . . . the filmy muslin clung upon her breast.’’96 Meanwhile, the figuration of the 

Fig. 26. Woman Stretching, from the Laud Ra¯ gama¯ la¯ Album, early 17th c. Opaque watercolor and gold on paper (wasli), page 38   24.6 cm. Bodleian Library, Oxford, MS. Laud Or. 149, fol. 2b.

Fig. 27. Woman with Infant, based on the parakı¯ya¯ pros˙ita na¯ yika¯ , from the Laud Ra¯ gama¯ la¯ Album, early 17th c. Opaque watercolor and gold on paper, page 38   24.6 cm. Bodleian Library, Oxford, MS. Laud Or. 149, fol. 44b.

Laud Album bather recurs in an early-seventeenth century illustration of Bhanudatta’s Rasaman˜ jarı¯, in dicating that she was a Rajput pictorial type in the period.97 She and the Laud heroine take virtually the same pose, though the Laud beauty looks behind her. It is possible that the viewers of the Laud would have perceived this bather to refer to a na¯ yika¯ and to derive from the ma¯rga pictorial and/or temple sculpture tradi tions. The image’s subsequent popularity among Hindu and Muslim viewers attests to its transcultural appeal. Like the pseudo Vaira¯rı¯ and T˙odi, she seems at least ini tially to have conveyed a rı¯ti or a Hindu courtly flavor.

In fact, there is good reason to think that four out of five of the non-Ra¯ gama¯ la¯ heroines in the Laud Album answered to ma¯rga or Rajput sources. The Rasaman˜ jarı¯ page with the bather also includes a woman holding a dish, rather like the gift-giving heroine in the Laud, but the type is too generic confidently to be associated with specific sources and will be left aside here. More tanta lizing is the enthroned na¯ yika¯ in Rajput clothing who receives a lotus from an infant on another of the Laud’s non-Ra¯ gama¯ la¯ pages (Fig. 27). While women on thrones became a common type, the infant, lotus, and cat suggest a specific iconographic inspiration, and a likely source is again suggested by the above-mentioned Rasaman˜ jarı¯. There the enthroned heroine appears as parakı¯ya¯ pros˙ita, a type of na¯ yika¯ who ‘‘belongs to another,’’ but whose lover is away (Fig. 28).98 Sheldon Pollock’s translation of the text reads ‘‘When her mother-in-law offered a

Fig. 28. Detail from a Rasaman˜ jarı¯ page picturing the parakı¯ya¯ pros˙ita na¯ yika¯ . India, probably Mewar, early 17th c. Opaque watercolor and gold on paper. National Museum, New Delhi.

lotus leaf, she raised a brow in thanks but wouldn’t touch it for fear it would dry to the point of kindling.’’99 The Rasaman˜ jarı¯ illustration pictures the mother-in-law on a throne and denotes her seniority by size, so that the na¯ yika¯ looks like a child. In the Laud Album page, it is clear that the enthroned woman, who sits in almost exactly the same pose as the Rasaman˜ jarı¯ mother-in law, is the na¯ yika¯ , while the diminutive na¯ yika¯ in the Laud Album painting is a baby. The mutation makes perfect sense: why would a Mughal connoisseur relish an enthroned mother-in-law? The spirit of the verse is respected, however, because the woman on the throne, who now receives the lotus instead of proffering it, does not quite touch the stem, for fear that it will ‘‘dry to the point of kindling.’’ Several dull lotuses sag in the infant’s hand, as if already wilting from the na¯ yika¯ ’s heat. The Rasaman˜ jarı¯ series was probably made a de cade or two later than the Laud Album, but its parakı¯ya¯ pros˙ita was presumably an established type, on which, I suggest, Abdul Rahim’s painter was drawing. If the enthroned woman in the Laud Album was Bhanudatta’s parakı¯ya¯ pros˙ita, the strange cat becomes meaningful, too, because the verses with which the poet introduces

the parakı¯ya¯ na¯ yika¯ describe a woman pretending to her husband’s family that the scratches her lover has left on her flesh were the work of a cat: ‘‘How can I possibly spend another night in that house? That cat of theirs is forever springing out of a corner niche to catch a mouse, and you see what all she’s done to me with her sharp claws!’’100 Thus Abdul Rahim and/or his artist seem to have been inventing Mughal-style imagery answering to literary and pictorial sources favored by the Rajputs.

It is unlikely these echoes of Ra¯ gama¯ la¯ and Sanskritic eroticism were coincidental. Jahangir described Abdul Rahim as a polyglot of wide cultural interests: ‘‘He knew Arabic, Turkish, Persian, and Hindi, and was quite erudite in all sorts of rational and traditional learning, even in Indian learning.’’101 Famed for his poetry in Brajbhasha, a prestigious courtly vernacular, Abdul Rahim, whose pen name was Rahim, is credited with several works that feature Indian na¯ yika¯s. One was his Avadhi Nagars´obha¯ (Lament for the City), ‘‘a series of vignettes about the traits of Indian women of different castes,’’ possibly modeled, according to Allison Busch, after a Persian genre called the shahra¯shu¯ b, about the charms of a city’s ‘‘handsome youth.’’102 Rahim also authored a Brajbhasha collection, which explored both a bhakti (Hindu devotional) theme and the ma¯rga trope of the twelve months. ‘‘The bhakti-oriented barvai verses,’’ writes Busch, ‘‘are an experiment with the Indic ba¯rah-ma¯sa motif that simultaneously exhibits the poet’s deep knowledge of Krishnaite poetic conventions.’’103 Rahim wrote verses in the same meter on the na¯ yi ka¯ bheda, or types of na¯ yika¯ . In other words, the stretch ing beauty, the woman with the vı¯n˙a¯ , the bather, and the enthroned woman with the baby, by uniting Sanskrit and vernacular with Mughal conventions, directly relate to the kinds of interests and experiments that were char acteristic of Rahim’s poetic oeuvre. The portrait of Zain Khan Khoka further alludes to patronage circles with interests in Hindu court culture because, Busch tells us, he was a lover not only of ra¯ gas but also of Hindi poetry.104 There are intimations here of a realm of con noisseurship that recognized the value of ma¯rga and Persian art forms, and that encouraged the production of new works out of both bodies of cultural knowledge.

Seventeenth-century Mughal painting gradually em braced innumerable such translations of na¯ yika¯ imagery, shifting away from the Persian preference for the beauti ful boy toward a greater attention to female beauty and the poetics of heterosexual love, though the former re mained a theme. Figures seemingly based in Ra¯ gama¯ la¯ or other ma¯rga iconographies, but similarly loosed from their original contexts, would eventually abound. The specific exchanges that fed a Mughal mainstreaming of ma¯rga love imagery have mostly gone unstudied, though Deborah Hutton’s and Debra Diamond’s discussions of a similar mainstreaming of the yoginı¯ image at Bijapur contribute pieces to the puzzle.105 In any case, the paint ings in the Laud Album exemplify a relatively early moment in this history.

Encompassing the leitmotifs of music and erotic love in the Laud Album is the overarching idea of the Mughal gentleman’s pleasures: music, beautiful women, pigeon keeping, hunting with the hawk, entertainment, and gift giving. The depiction in the Laud Album of a com posite palanquin of women, cradling a coddled prince, refers to one of the more peculiar pleasures of court life. According to the mid-seventeenth-century traveler Jean-Baptiste Tavernier, the courtesans at the court of the Golconda Shah could ‘‘represent the form of an ele phant, four making the four feet, four others the body, and one the trunk, [with] the King, mounted above on a kind of throne.’’106 One wonders if such feats were especially associated with the courtesans of the Deccan. Meanwhile, the picture of pigeons, though itself common album content, seems to have implied a now forgotten association with the portrayed Zain Khan Khoka, be cause a similar picture of pigeons appears below a por trait of that gentleman on a single album page now in the British Library.107 Meanwhile, the muraqqa‘ itself made a theme of the elite pastimes of calligraphy and looking at painting, which were also social pleasures to be shared with friends and lovers.

Only one page, the picture of the Sufi, seems to stand out from this thematic background. With his eyes closed and his head tilted as if in a trance, he is the opposite of social pleasure. Preliminary readings of the calligraphy suggest the painting of the Sufi picks up on a mystical theme in the album’s written pages. In keep ing with what we know of Abdul Rahim’s beliefs, the calligraphic passages of the muraqqa‘ draw from Shia, Sunni, and especially Sufi texts.108 For example, Alasdair Watson has identified a verse from Jami’s treatise on Sufism, ‘‘Flashes of Light’’ or Lawa¯ ‘ih˙, on the page opposite the painting of the stretching beauty:

O Thou whose sacred precincts none may see, Unseen Thou makest all things seen to be; Thou and we are not separate, yet still Thou has no need of us, but we of Thee.109

The Sufi, who is the sole figure physically oriented toward the viewer, shuts his eyes to him, similarly ex pressing devotion to a God who cannot be seen. His closed eyes seem to reject the Laud Album’s myriad en ticements to look.

Yet, the Sufi is not the anomaly he initially appears to be. Mughal-era texts on comportment and masculinity stressed the importance of a nobleman’s spiritual en

deavors to his self-realization. Cultivation of the spiri tual, moral, and sensual self pertained to what in Islamic culture was called a¯ da¯ b, a concept Rosalind O’Hanlon describes as a ‘‘fusing together’’ of ‘‘practical action and spiritual meaning . . . at once moral training, cultivation of manner, bodily discipline and spiritual refinement.’’ ‘‘In more cosmopolitan cultural settings,’’ she elaborates, ‘‘a¯ da¯ b also denoted a generalized ideal of civilized and cultured behavior in which non-Muslim men could share.’’110 Rajeev Kumar Kinra has likewise noted the importance in seventeenth-century Mughal writings ‘‘of mysticism and the Sufi idiom as a significant feature not just of the world of religious divines, but also of edu cated parlance generally during this period.’’111 That spirituality was a necessary component of the gentle man’s cultured life is born out by the ubiquity of saints, dervishes, Sufis, and yogis in other seventeenth-century Mughal muraqqa‘ like the Salim Album or the Dara Shikoh Album. The Mughal mirza¯¯ı, or cultured elite, evidently enjoyed connoisseurship of the arts with a clear awareness of the limited rewards promised by sensual pleasure from a spiritual purview. In the words of the early-seventeenth-century Mughal writer Baqir, whom O’Hanlon discusses at length, ‘‘the individual who gallops his steed of courage in the field of content ment should be considered a man. He is neither exhi larated on having material things, nor expresses regrets on their loss.’’112

The Sufi also potentially relates to the many refer ences to the divine in the Ra¯ gama¯ la¯ pages. Calligraphic passages in the Laud Album allude to Allah in Sufi terms as the beloved.113 Someone familiar with Ra¯ ga ma¯ la¯s would have known them often to picture their heroes as Krishna, and typically to have included yogis meditating beside shrines and women in the garb of ascetics meditating on their absent beloveds. In the Laud Album, Bhairavı¯ Ra¯ ginı¯ worships at Shiva’s shrine. ‘‘Out in the lake, in a shrine of crystal, she worships Siva with songs punctuated by the beat’’ goes a dhya¯ na frequently provided for this ra¯ ginı¯.114 More explicit would have been the association of Krishna with the hero of Vasanta Ra¯ ginı¯ (Fig. 10): ‘‘His topknot, bound with peacock feathers, is erect; his face, because of the burgeoning mango-shoot, is as a flower. Elephantlike, in the forest joyfully he wanders among the gopis, (such is) Vasanta Raga [sic].’’115

The recontextualization of Ra¯ gama¯ la¯ paintings in the Laud Album thus brought out those of its themes most piquant to the Mughal gentleman and his friends. The Laud Album is, to date, the earliest Mughal pic torial expression of a taste for the Ra¯ gama¯ la¯ , which would become a significant feature of elite Mughal social circles later in the seventeenth century. Abul Fazl had earlier described Ra¯ gama¯ la¯s in his A¯’ı¯n-i-Akbarı¯, where he noted the Hindu belief that the god Shiva and his wife Parvati invented the ra¯ ga-ra¯ ginı¯ system. He assigned it to ‘‘marga or the lofty style as chanted by the gods and great Rishis.’’116 By the later seventeenth century, Mughal patrons of ra¯ gas were embracing them as canon ical elite knowledge. Katherine Butler Schofield has found that Mughal treatises on Indian music were written by elite connoisseurs for elite connoisseurs rather than for musicians, and that knowledge of Indian music was cul tivated in the kinds of social circles to which the Laud Album would have belonged. ‘‘Music was patronized through a series of friendship circles with mutual inter ests in music, poetry, and Sufism.’’117

According to Schofield, ra¯ gas and ra¯ ginı¯s also be came associated with Unani medicine. Keeping the body’s humors in balance was essential for an elite Mughal male. Islamic tradition had long held that music could affect the bodily humors, and in India music was linked to the Ayurvedic humors as early as the thirteenth century.118 What probably made the ra¯ gas and ra¯ ginı¯s intriguing for Unani medicine were their relationships with days and seasons. Schofield quotes the late-seventeenth-century theorist Ras Bara Khan: ‘‘in the second prahar of the day, when the sun is shin ing and it is hot, Ra¯ gas which emphasize the watery swaras (Sa and Pa) should be performed to balance the heat with cold.’’119 In Schofield’s own words: ‘‘[T]o the Mughal male elite, the role of music in ameliorating the ill effects of humoral imbalance or the adverse influence of the stars was fundamental to its purpose. . . . [T]he extramusical associations of the ra¯ gas, and in particular their auspicious timings, became indispensable to the wellbeing of listeners in the mehfil (gathering).’’120 It is unclear whether the medical dimension of music was important for the Rajputs this early in the seventeenth century, but in this connection it is worth noting Raja Rai Singh’s interest in medicine, expressed in his Rai Singh-Mahotsav.121

For centuries, both Indic and Persian elite socializ ing had, separately, centered on the consumption and production of the arts. Muslim and Rajput courtiers, now brought together, would have faced the challenge of socializing with one another without recourse to one another’s canons of cultural knowledge. The milieux for this socializing were the majlis and the mehfil, men’s assemblies typically organized around food, wine, poetry, music, dance, and sometimes spiritual discourse. Majlis and mehfil were Persian terms that made their way into the Rajput lexicon, though the Rajputs would also have used the Indic word ‘‘akha¯ro.’’122 The muraqqa‘ was an art form for the majlis: in Persia, as Roxburgh has written, ‘‘members of the court formed an audience of arbiters, some of whom were also practitioners, who would gather to contemplate its contents—calligra phies, paintings, drawings, and illumination—and dis cuss them.’’123 The social themes of the Laud Album seem to speak to similar reception in Mughal India.

Recent research into the cultural and social dimen sions of Mughal life is now beginning to serve up valuable descriptions of how life at court integrated the practice of rule with the pleasures of social exchange. In his study of the imperial mum˙´s¯ı Chandar Bhan, for example, Rajeev Kinra gives us the mum˙´s¯ı’s description of how Shah Jahan (r. 1627–1658) exercised his authority over extravagant breakfasts of ‘‘amber-scented confections’’ and elephant fights.124 As the emperor’s albums were brought for his perusal, intellectual debate proceeded in one part of the room, poets praised the emperor in another, while in a third corner, the imperial secretaries continued with their work.125

Such gatherings were replicated, though less grandly, throughout the Mughal empire. According to Chandar Bhan: ‘‘the Khan-i Khanan’s bravery, bold ingenuity, fortitude, presence of mind, excellence, and all-around perfection, not to mention the pleasure of his company and the circle of scholars and wordsmiths and other intellectuals in the said Khan’s atelier, was brighter than the sun. When he was in the Deccan, in his meetings/ assemblies these other folks used to also convene in his assembly.’’ Mughal administrators stationed in the Deccan held their own mehfils, ‘‘many of which,’’ in Kinra’s paraphrase of Chandar Bhan, ‘‘were integrated as part of the same intellectual network as that of Abdul Rahim.’’126 No doubt Raja Rai Singh was part of this network and hosted such gatherings himself. Rima Hooja notes a verse traditionally ascribed to Akbar, which praises the social charms of Raja Rai Singh’s brother Peethal: ‘‘With the death of Peethal have gone the pleasures of the majlis.’’127

To close, the recontextualization of Ra¯ gama¯ la¯ pages in a Persianate muraqqa‘ raises several intriguing ques tions about Mughal receptions of what I have been calling ma¯rga culture. If we were to extrapolate from the Laud Album, to what extent would we find ma¯rga heroines and erotic imagery permeating Mughal culture by way of spontaneous, pleasurable exchanges among Mughal friends of different religious and cultural back grounds rather than by way of the more programmatic responses to Hindu religion and court culture sponsored by the emperors Akbar and Jahangir? And if Rajput arts were a fixture of the early-seventeenth-century Mughal majlis, to what degree might the Mughal connoisseur’s interest in Ra¯ gama¯ la¯s have stimulated the Rajputs to havethem illustrated? Busch has proposed that late-sixteenth and early-seventeenth-century patronage within the ‘‘Per sian political ecumene’’ was an important factor in the cultural success of Brajbhasha court poetry,128 while Schofield has drawn attention to the significant impetus Mughal patronage gave to Hindustani music.129 There is no question that the imperial Mughal workshop in spired the Rajput elite to patronize paintings, but the larger cultural context suggests that the conspicuous use of ma¯rga conventions to illustrate Ra¯ gama¯ la¯s and other Rajput courtly texts followed the pattern of litera ture and music. If Ra¯ gama¯ la¯s were intended for majlis style social gatherings, then their ma¯rga compartments, abstractions, bright reds, and other related conventions were not insular expressions. Instead, they may have been attempts to canonize or ‘‘classicize,’’ to use Schofield’s term, the ma¯rga pictorial tradition in Mughal culture.

The Laud Ra¯ gama¯ la¯ Album is a reminder that Rajput painting originated out of social interaction, not regional isolation. No one, it turns out, was absolutely wrong about the Laud Album: it was, in fact, probably a Deccani tome that was also Rajput, but that was produced for the subimperial nobleman par excellence, Abdul Rahim. All such definitions make sense given the social, mobile, subimperial conditions of its production. More than raising questions of connoisseurial practice, though, these conditions indicate Rajput visual arts of the era were addressing Mughal society rather than pulling away from it, and could potentially change how we understand what it meant to be Rajput in late sixteenth and early-seventeenth-century Mughal India and what Rajput culture meant to the Mughals.

Molly Emma Aitken is associate professor at The City College of New York. Her book, The Intelligence of Tradition in Rajput Court Painting (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), received the Charles Rufus Morey Award in 2011 and the Ananda Kentish Coo maraswamy Book Prize in 2012. Aitken specializes in Mughal and Rajput painting, and has published and cu rated on a range of topics including contemporary folk art and South Asian jewelry. [maitken@ccny.cuny.edu]

Notes

1. For a concise discussion of this policy, see Catherine B. Asher and Cynthia Talbot, India Before Europe (Cam bridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). Asher and Talbot offer the translation ‘‘universal toleration’’ (129).

2. I have used the Library of Congress systems to transliterate Devana¯garı¯ and Persian. I have not used dia critics in the names of persons, gods/goddesses, or places.

3. What scholars call ‘‘pre-Mughal’’ painting refers to a host of varied styles. The so-called Candayana and Caurapan˜ casika styles are especially relevant here. For extensive discussions of ‘‘subimperial’’ art and architec ture, see, especially, the publications of Catherine Asher and John Seyller.

4. I would like to thank Shanane Davis for her assis tance with this project and for our productive discussions of the issues. I would also like to thank John Seyller and Allison Busch for their generous feedback on this essay.

5. Shanane Davis, The Bikaner School of Usta Arti sans and Their Heritage (Jodhpur: RMG Exports, 2008). The collection is also discussed in Molly Aitken and Sha nane Davis with Yana Van Dycke, ‘‘Old Methods in a New Era: What Can Connoisseurship Tell Us About Rukn-ud-din?’’ in A Companion to Asian Art and Archi tecture, ed. Rebecca M. Brown and Deborah S. Hutton (Oxford: Blackwell, 2011), 233–63.

6. The Bhagnagar painting is inscribed in Hindi: ‘‘Bought at Bhagnagar, purchase price 800 rupees, checked today in 1693.’’ Mark Zebrowski noted that the inscrip tion resembled inscriptions on other Deccani paintings in the Bikaner Palace Collection. Mark Zebrowksi, Deccani Painting (London: Philip Wilson; New Delhi: Roli Books International, 1983), 207. The Usta tracing of this painting has been reproduced in Davis, The Bikaner School, section I, pl. 48. The equestrian drawing of Maharaja Anup Singh is unpublished, but one equestrian portrait based on it is published in Basil Gray, Treasures of Indian Miniatures in the Bikaner Palace Collection (Oxford: Bruno Cassirer, 1951), pl. 8; and a second is in the Asian Art Museum, San Francisco, no. B86D13. The drawing initially rendered Anup Singh’s back arm lowered, as it appears in the paint ing in Gray, then effaced that version to raise the hand bearing the spear, in the manner depicted in the San Fran cisco version. The drawing of the woman worshipping a Shiva lin˙ga is reproduced in Davis, The Bikaner School, section II, pl. 23. The corresponding painting is in the Museum fu¨r Indische Kunst, Berlin, and is reproduced in Ernst Waldschmidt and Rose Leonore Waldschmidt, Miniatures of Musical Inspiration in the Collection of the Berlin Museum of Indian Art (Bombay: Popular Prakashan, 1967), fig. 117. The drawing of Sulaiman is reproduced in Davis, The Bikaner School, section I, pl. 81, while the corresponding painting, which is in the Isabella and Vicky Ducrot collection, is reproduced in Vicky Ducrot, Four Centuries of Rajput Painting (Milan: Skira, 2009), DN4. The Rashid painting is published in Hermann Goetz, The Art and Architecture of Bikaner State (Oxford: Bruno Cassirer, 1950), pl. 77. At that time, it was in the Lalgarh Palace collection. Rashid modeled his painting almost exactly on a depiction of Aurangzeb hunting now in the Chester Beatty Library, Dublin (no. 11A.28), but replaced Aurangzeb’s with Anup Singh’s portrait.

7. Molly Aitken, ‘‘On Tradition in Nineteenth-Century Indian Painting: Definitions at Odds in the Paintings of Rahim, Chotu, and Abanindranath Tagore’’ (working title; manuscript in process).

8. I have recently found a number of drawings with the same kinds of workshop markings and in the same styles, many of them of related compositions, still in the possession of Usta artists in India. Several local sources confirm that much of the collection was sold in the 1950s.

9. For the phrase ‘‘kha¯ ka jharana,’’ see Moti Chandra, The Technique of Mughal Painting (Lucknow: U.P. His torical Society, 1949), 39.

10. John Seyller, Workshop and Patron in Mughal India: The Freer Ramayana and Other Illustrated Manu scripts of ‘Abd al-Rahim, Artibus Asiae Supplementum 42 (Zurich: Artibus Asiae, 1999).

11. In addition to Seyller’s work, the significant litera ture on the Laud Ra¯ gama¯ la¯ Album is: Herbert J. Stooke and Karl Khandalavala, The Laud Ragamala Miniatures: A Study in Indian Painting and Music (Oxford: Bruno Cassirer, 1953); Hermann Goetz, ‘‘The Laud Album and Early Rajput Painting,’’ The Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland 1/2 (April 1954): 63– 74; and Karl Khandalavala, ‘‘The Laud Ragamala Minia tures,’’ Marg 6, no. 4 (1953): 26–29.

12. For high-resolution reproductions of the paintings in the manuscript, search ‘‘Laud Ragamala’’ in the Oxford Digital Image Library’s ‘‘Masterpieces of the non-Western Book’’ at http://www.odl.ox.ac.uk/digitalimagelibrary/ oriental_home.html.

13. Goetz, in ‘‘The Laud Album,’’ pointed to Rajput dress in the Laud Ra¯ gama¯ la¯ pages to support his convic tion that they were produced in Amber.

14. David Roxburgh, ‘‘Persian Drawing, ca. 1400– 1450: Materials and Creative Procedures,’’ in Muqarnas XIX: An Annual on the Visual Culture of the Islamic World (Leiden: Brill, 2002), 44–77.

15. Ewers without handles are mentioned by Mark Zebrowski, Gold, Silver, and Bronze from Mughal India (London: Alexandria Press, 1997), figs. 196–197.

16. Khandalavala, ‘‘The Laud Ragamala Miniatures,’’ and Goetz, ‘‘The Laud Album.’’ For references to the album as ‘‘provincial Mughal’’ and ‘‘subimperial,’’ see, for ex ample, Harold Powers, ‘‘Illustrated Inventories of Indian Ragamala Painting,’’ Journal of the American Oriental Society, 110/4 (October–December 1980), 490; and Klaus Ebeling, Ragamala Painting (New Delhi: Ravi Kumar, 1973), 163.

17. Seyller, Workshop and Patron, 207, 257–63. 18. Ibid., 258. I believe all the Ra¯ gama¯ la¯ paintings in the album are by the same artist.

19. Ibid., 259.

20. The painting is in the collection of Harvard Uni versity’s Arthur M. Sackler Museum, no. 2009.202.250. At the time of publication, a reproduction is available through an online search of the collection at www.harvard artmuseums.org/collection/. For Abul Fazl’s use of the word ‘‘dam˙ r˙iya¯ ’’ to describe the cloth that goes over the head and is fastened at the waist, see Abul Fazl-i-al-Alla´mı´,

A‘in-i Akbari, Volume III, trans. Colonel H. S. Jarrett (New Delhi: Oriental Books Reprint, 1978), 342. 21. Seyller, Workshop and Patron, 76.

22. Rima Hooja, History of Rajasthan (New Delhi: Rupa and Co., 2006), 544–47.

23. Seyller, Workshop and Patron, 56–57.

24. Seyller, Workshop and Patron, 46; Annemarie Schimmel, ‘‘A Dervish in the Guise of a Prince: Khan-i Khanan ‘Abd al-Rahim as a Patron,’’ in The Powers of Art: Patronage in Indian Culture, ed. Barbara Stoler Miller (Delhi and New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 209–10.

25. For reproductions of the Ra¯ ma¯ yan˙a in the Freer, see http://www.asia.si.edu/collections/search.cfm, and search ‘‘Freer Ramayana’’ or ‘‘F1907.271.’’

26. Davis, The Bikaner School, 52; Melia Belli, ‘‘Royal Umbrellas of Stone: Memory, Political Propaganda, and Public Identity,’’ PhD diss., University of California, Los Angeles, 2009, 225. Davis interviewed Jamil Usta, grand son of Hisam-ud-din; Belli interviewed Zahar-ud Din Usta.

27. Davis published the genealogy in The Bikaner School, fold-out. Hermann Goetz Art and Architecture, 101, mentions Shah Muhammad as the father of Nur Muhammad.

28. Reproduced in Karl J. Khandalavala, Moti Chandra, and Pramod Chandra, Miniature Paintings from the Sri Motichand Khajanchi Collection (New Delhi: Lalit Kala Akademi, 1960), fig. 82, no. 114.

29. Naval Krishna, ‘‘Bikaneri Miniature Painting Work shops of Ruknuddin, Ibrahim, and Nathu,’’ Lalit Kala 21 (1990): 23–27.

30. Though Khandalavala, Chandra, and Chandra, Miniature Paintings, no. 114, estimated it to have been produced in the last quarter of the seventeenth century.

31. Milo C. Beach, ‘‘Farrukh Beg,’’ in Masters of Indian Painting, ed. Milo C. Beach, Eberhard Fischer, and B. N. Goswamy, Artibus Asiae Supplementum 48 I/II (Zurich: Artibus Asiae Publishers, 2011), 1:194.

32. A couple of Akbar-period Mughal manuscript pages are ascribed to a Shah Muhammad. The name was reasonably common, so one cannot assume that the two were the same. However, though I have not seen these paintings, which have not been published, John Seyller ‘‘has no doubt’’ the Shah Muhammad who participated in these manuscripts was the Bikaner Shah Muhammad (personal communication, 1 August 2012). One is a page from the Keir Collection’s Keir Khamsa of Nizami and the other is from the 1584 Timurnama in the Khuda Baksh Public Library. Shah Muhammad’s involvement in these manuscripts is noted in Milo Beach, The Imperial Image: Paintings for the Mughal Court (Washington, DC: Freer Gallery of Art, 1981), 218, 221.

33. Goetz, Art and Architecture, 97–98.

34. For example, Davis, The Bikaner School, section I, pls. 32, 33, 37. Other Mughal-style drawings in the Usta collection, in particular a drawing of the Virgin Mary (I, pl. 40); a siyah qalam (monochrome drawing) of Mary, Jesus, and angels (I, pl. 39); and a nim qalam of the Prophet Sulaiman with angels (I, pl. 81) almost certainly follow from well-documented contacts with Mughal paint ing and painters at Bikaner in the mid- to later seventeenth century.

35. Now in the Gursharan and Elvira Sidhu Collec tion. Published in Gray, Treasures of Indian Miniatures, pl. IV.

36. Joachim K. Bautze, ‘‘Early Painting at Bundi,’’ in Court Painting in Rajasthan, ed. Andrew Topsfield (Mumbai: Marg Publications, 2000), 13–14. Bhoj Singh’s appearance is also known from a portrait of him in the Arthur M. Sackler Museum, Harvard Art Museum, no. 2009.202.39, recently reproduced in Milo C. Beach, ‘‘The Masters of the Chunar Ragamala and the Hada Master,’’ in Masters of Indian Painting, 1:fig. 10.

37. I am grateful to John Seyller for bringing this painting to my attention. Pramod Chandra, in R. C. Sharma et al., Indian Art Treasures: Suresh Neotia Collec tion (New Delhi: Mosaic Books, 2006), 135, expresses some doubt about the inscription on the Goenka painting, because the painting is in an Akbari style. However, the evidence presented in this chapter, and the Akbari style of Nur Muhammad’s other known paintings, seem to support the evidence of the inscription.

38. In Darielle Mason et al., Intimate Worlds: Indian Paintings from the Alvin O. Bellak Collection (Philadel phia: Philadelphia Museum of Art, 2001), 56, John Seyller notes ‘‘the many similarities’’ between the Goenka painting inscribed to Nur Muhammad and a Ra¯ ma¯ yan˙a painting inscribed to Nur Muhammad that came up for auction at Christie’s in 2000 (Christie’s, London, Islamic Art and Manuscripts, Sale 6374, October 10, 2000, lot 59). The Ra¯ ma¯ yan˙a page is now in the Museum of Islamic Art, Qatar. The painting belongs to a manuscript dated 1594, twelve years before the Bhoj Singh portrait was produced. A colophon in the manuscript states it was ‘‘translated by the order of his Royal Majesty,’’ and two further notes identify it as the property of Humayun’s wife Hamida Banu Begum. I have not been able to see the painting in person, but reproductions suggest some affinity with the portrait of Bhoj Singh. Its main figures are also framed against a narrow gray arch, its figural forms are somewhat simplified, its faces share with Bhoj Singh the same abbre viated eye and simple brow; the black foliated band above the central characters strongly resembles the band above Bhoj Singh’s arch, and the crenellations in both paintings feature the same stylized floret. See also Linda Leach, Paintings from India, Nasser D. Khalili Collection of Islamic Art, vol. 8 (London: Nour Foundation with Azimuth Editions and Oxford University Press, 1998), 40–49.

39. Collection of Catherine and Ralph Benkaim. My thanks to Catherine Glynn Benkaim for bringing the paint ing to my attention. An inscription on the back identifies the man as ‘‘Kunwar Sur Singh.’’

40. Sur is referred to sometimes as Surat Singh and sometimes as Suraj Singh. In his memoirs, Jahangir calls

him Suraj Singh. Jahangir, The Jahangirnama, trans. and ed. Wheeler M. Thackston (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution; New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 134.

41. John Seyller, in Intimate Worlds, 66, writes: ‘‘the spare compositions, cool palette, and pronounced linear quality of this Bhagavata Purana series are akin to those of paintings produced at Bikaner in the last third of the seventeenth century.’’ Another painting with a Bikaner palace stamp in a nearly identical style has recently come to light, which may further help substantiate the assump tion that the Bha¯ gavatapura¯ n˙a is an early Bikaner series. The sahelis (friends) in this unpublished painting could have stepped from a page of the Bha¯ gavatapura¯ n˙a series. Pramod Chandra describes the attribution to Bikaner of the Bha¯ gavatapura¯ n˙a as ‘‘unsubstantiated’’ in Sharma et al., Indian Art Treasures, 135.

42. I strongly believe that we need a term to describe these conventions. It has been a struggle to come up with a good label, and I want to thank Allison Busch for pro posing ‘‘marga’’ (personal communication, October 2012). It remains to be seen whether marga is the best term, so I use it provisionally here. In using it, I am also following Katherine Butler Schofield’s lead. She applies the term marga to Indian musical traditions that fit what she pre cisely lays out as the terms by which classical or marga status can be said to have been attained. Katherine Butler Schofield, ‘‘Reviving the Golden Age: ‘Classicization,’ Hin dustani Music, and the Mughals,’’ Ethnomusicology 54:3 (Fall 2010), 484–517.

43. Ebeling, Ragamala Painting, 56–62.

44. Katherine Butler Brown [now Schofield], ‘‘Hindu stan Music in the Time of Aurangzeb,’’ PhD diss., School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, 2003. For an excellent recent treatment of Ra¯ gama¯ la¯ painting, see Catherine Glynn, Robert Skelton, and Anna L. Dallapiccola, Ragamala Paintings from India from the Claudio Moscatelli Collection (London: Dulwich Picture Gallery with Philip Wilson, 2011).

45. Brown, ‘‘Hindustani Music,’’ 179.

46. This impression was reaffirmed in discussion with Katherine Butler Schofield and Allyn Miner, summer 2011, London.

47. For the Jain series, see Ebeling, Ragamala Paint ing, 120–21; Robert Skelton, ‘‘Ragamalas in the Deccan and What Happens when Ragas Migrate Without Their Texts,’’ in Glynn, Skelton, and Dallapiccola, Ragamala Paintings from India, 23–28.

48. W. Norman Brown, ‘‘Some Early Rajasthani Raga Paintings,’’ Journal of the Indian Society of Oriental Art 16 (1948): 1–10; Anand Krishna, ‘‘An Early Ragamala Series,’’ Ars Orientalis 4 (1961): 368–72.

49. As I note later, the assumption that Devana¯garı¯ texts of this period were necessarily produced for Rajputs may need to be reexamined. Rahim, for instance, was pro ficient in Brajbhasha and Sanskrit, and may have patron ized some of the Devana¯garı¯ illustrated series that scholars have not yet been able to place.

50. Pages from this series are noted and or reproduced in: Sotheby’s, London, Fine Oriental Miniatures and Manu scripts, 11 July 1973, lot 235; Alice N. Heeramaneck, Masterpieces of Indian Painting Formerly in the Nasli M. Heeramaneck Collections (Verona: A. N. Heeramaneck, 1984), pl. 228; Armand Neven, Peintures des Indes: Mythologies et legendes (Bruxelles: Studio du Passage 44, 1976), 94, nos. 77, 78; Sotheby Parke-Bernet, New York, Important Tibetan, Nepalese, Indian and Southeast Asian Works of Art, 10 December 1981, lot 19; Amy Poster, Realms of Heroism: Indian Paintings at the Brooklyn Museum (New York: Hudson Hills Press with the Brooklyn Museum, 1994), no. 33; at the San Diego Museum of Art, no. 1990.319; at the Bharat Kala Bhavan, Varanasi, repro duced on ArtStor; and one page is in a private collection. The sizes of these pages are not always given, and the bor ders are in varied conditions, but the size of the Brooklyn page (Brooklyn Museum, no. 78.187.1), for example, which has roughly the same amount of its borders intact, matches the size of the Usta page. All but one of the pages and the Usta page discussed here have been listed in Glynn, Skelton, and Dallapiccola, Ragamala Paintings from India, 64. The Heeramaneck page was sold at Sotheby’s, New York, The Heeramaneck Collection of Indian Sculpture, Paintings and Textiles, November 2, 1988, lot 96.

51. Elsewhere the Berlin Ra¯ gama¯ la¯ is distinguished from what is sometimes called Ra¯gama¯la¯ Series B: I consider them part of one manuscript. There are indica tions that one page associated with this series (LACMA, M.74.5.14) was extensively overpainted, with the inscrip tion written on the side copied incorrectly. The page some what muddies the waters, though it seems to be an isolated example, possibly of an original so damaged that someone chose to overpaint it on the model of the corresponding Berlin Ra¯ gama¯ la¯ page.

52. Compare the Ka¯ moda Ra¯ ginı¯ from the Usta Ra¯ ga ma¯ la¯ (Brooklyn Museum of Art, no. 79.187.1) with the Berlin Ra¯ gama¯ la¯ T˙odi Ra¯ ginı¯ in the Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sangrahalaya, Mumbai. As of June 2012, the Brooklyn page could be found on ArtStor.

53. Pratapaditya Pal, The Classical Tradition in Rajput Painting from the Paul F. Walter Collection (New York: Pierpont Morgan Library, 1978), 56.

54. Van˙ga¯ la Ra¯ ginı¯, in the Museum fu¨r Indische Kunst, Berlin, is reproduced in Waldschmidt and Wald schmidt, Miniatures of Musical Inspiration, fig. 133; the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s Bha¯ gavatapura¯ n˙a page, no. 2004-149-17, is reproduced in Mason, Intimate Worlds, 67.

55. Vaira¯rı¯ Ra¯ ginı¯, Metropolitan Museum of Art, no. 1981.464.1; the Goenka page is reproduced in B. N. Goswamy with Usha Bhatia, Painted Visions: The Goenka Collection of Indian Paintings (New Delhi: Lalit Kala Aka demi, 1999), cat. 84.

56. See, for example, the cholı¯ in Des´ vara¯rı¯ Ra¯ ginı¯ at the Metropolitan Museum, no. 1987.417.2, and in a half page remnant from a Bha¯ gavatapura¯ n˙a in the Brooklyn Museum, no. 84.201.2.

57. For a reproduction of the Usta Ra¯ gama¯ la¯ Vasanta Ra¯ ginı¯, see Neven, Peintures des Indes, cat. 78. 58. Waldschmidt and Waldschmidt, Miniatures of Musical Inspiration, 427, noted that the text panels of the Manley Ra¯ gama¯ la¯ are ‘‘in the same manner and the same characters as the Berlin specimens.’’ For reproductions of the full manuscript, see the British Museum on-line collec tion, http://www.britishmuseum.org/research/search_the_ collection_database.aspx, and search ‘‘Manley Ragamala.’’ 59. Daniel Ehnbom, Indian Miniatures: The Ehrenfeld Collection (New York: Hudson Hills Press with the Amer ican Federation of Arts, 1985), 50.

60. Compare, for example, the flowering plants along the riverbank in a Bha¯ gavatapura¯ n˙a scene of Balarama with the gopas, which has been reproduced by Sam Fogg with the flowering plants at the base of the Manley Ra¯ gama¯ la¯ ’s Hin˙d˙ola Ra¯ ga (British Museum, no. 1973,0917,0.40). The Bha¯ gavatapura¯ n˙a scene has been reproduced in Indian Paintings and Manuscripts 21 (London: Sam Fogg, 1999), cat. 23.

61. Robert Cran placed the Manley Ra¯ gama¯ la¯ in Agra on the basis of the Hindi dialect that follows the Sanskrit inscription, but Allison Busch (personal communication) finds no support for this claim. Robert Cran, ‘‘The Manley Ragamala: An Album of Indian Illustrated Musical Modes,’’ The British Museum Yearbook 4: Music and Civilization (London: British Museum, 1980): 202.

62. Ebeling, Ragamala Painting, 163.

63. Reproduced in Joachim Bautze, Indian Miniature Paintings c. 1590–c. 1850 (Amsterdam: Galerie Saundarya Lahari, 1987), cat. 44.

64. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, no. 1999.518; Chazen Museum, University of Wisconsin–Madison, no. 2005.1.63.

65. Joseph Dye states that the series was produced in Bikaner under Raja Karan Singh (r. 1631–1669), but does not give his reasons. Joseph M. Dye III, The Arts of India (Richmond: Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, in association with Philip Wilson, London, 2001), 300–301. Nonstylistic reasons for associating the series with Bikaner include its marbled backing, a Deccani feature found in a few seven teenth-century Bikaner paintings, and its Persian and Devana¯garı¯ inscriptions, which resemble inscriptions at the top and bottom of other Bikaner paintings.

66. See Joachim Bautze, Lotosmond and Lo¨ wentritt: In dische Miniaturemalerei (Stuttgart: Linden-Museum, 1991), cat. 26.

67. Schimmel, ‘‘A Dervish in the Guise of a Prince,’’ 211. 68. Compare, for example, the turbans in the proces sion scene in a page of the Bha¯ gavatapura¯ n˙a at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, no. M.84.229.4, repro duced, on their website, http://collections.lacma.org/node/ 249298 (accessed December 2012).

69. This page of the Bha¯ gavatapura¯ n˙a is in the Metro politan Museum of Art, no. 2002.176. See the museum’s website, http://www.metmuseum.org/collections/search the-collections, search ‘‘2002.176’’ (accessed June 2012). 

70. Seyller noted this convention in Workshop and Patron, 259. On the association of this page with Bikaner, see B. N. Goswamy and Caron Smith, Domains of Wonder: Selected Masterworks of Indian Painting (San Diego: San Diego Museum of Art, 2005), pls. 16, 17.

71. Pramod Chandra, ‘‘Ustad Salivahana and the Devel opment of Popular Mughal Art,’’ Lalit Kala 8 (1960): 25–46. 72. Seyller, Workshop and Patron, 58.

73. Catherine Asher describes the cohesiveness of Mughal-style subimperial architecture during this period, particularly that produced by Amber’s Raja Man Singh. See especially, ‘‘The Architecture of Raja Man Singh: A Study of Sub-Imperial Patronage,’’ in Architecture of Medieval India: Forms, Contexts, Histories, ed. Monica Juneja (Delhi: Permanent Black, 2001), 370–97.

74. A couple of pages were recently published in Glynn, Skelton, and Dallapiccola, Ragamala Paintings from India, cats. 14 and 15.

75. Ibid., 24.

76. The possibility of such a sphere merits consider able further research. Illustrated series such as the Boston Rasikpriya share many elements found in the paintings dis cussed here.

77. Jahangir mentions Dulip Singh arriving from the Deccan in The Jahangirnama, 134.

78. Reproductions of these Asavaris can be found as follows: Chawand Asavari Ra¯ ginı¯, Victoria and Albert, no. IS38-1953, see their website http://collections.vam.ac. uk; Chunar Asavari Ra¯ ginı¯, Freer and Sackler Galleries, no. F1985.3, website www.asia.si.edu; Manley Ra¯ gama¯ la¯ Asavari Ra¯ ginı¯, British Museum no. 1973,0917,0.8, web site www.britishmuseum.org).

79. For the most recent scholarship on the Chunar Ra¯ gama¯ la¯ , see Beach, ‘‘The Master of the Chunar Raga mala,’’ Masters of Indian Painting, 1:291–304.

80. This a long-standing theme in the scholarly litera ture on Mewar painting. For my own summary, see Molly Emma Aitken, The Intelligence of Tradition in Rajput Court Painting (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010), 60–70.

81. Ebeling, Ragamala Painting, 118–28.

82. Beach, ‘‘The Masters of the Chunar Ragamala.’’ 83. Bautze, ‘‘Early Painting at Bundi,’’ 13.

84. Ibid., 14.

85. Recently, an early seventeenth-century Bundi-style portrait of Rao Bhoj Singh, previously in the Bikaner Palace collection, was sold through Prahlad Bubbar’s London gallery.

86. Finbar Barry Flood, Objects of Translation: Mate rial Culture and Medieval ‘‘Hindu-Muslim’’ Encounter (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009), 8. 87. Ibid., 9.

88. Seyller, Workshop and Patron, 264.

89. Goetz, ‘‘The Laud Album,’’ 63-74.

90. For more on the Mughal muraqqa‘, see Elaine Wright, Muraqqa‘: Imperial Mughal Albums from the

Chester Beatty Library (Alexandria, VA: Art Services In ternational, 2008). Though beautifully illustrated and extensively informative, the catalogue did not take up the challenge of exploring the intellectual dimensions of the muraqqa‘ laid down by David Roxburgh’s The Persian Album, 1400–1600: From Dispersal to Collection (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005).

91. Roxburgh, The Persian Album.

92. Sheila Canby, ‘‘‘Abd Al-Samad,’’ in Masters of Indian Painting, 1:98.

93. I am intrigued by Anastassia Botschkareva’s sug gestion to me, which she made after extensive study of Mughal albums, that the emphasis on calligraphy, presence of Arabic texts, less tightly scripted arrangement of pages, and juxtaposition of paintings with calligraphy, answers more to Safavid than Mughal prototypes (personal com munication, August 2012).

94. Allison Busch, Poetry of Kings: The Classical Hindi Literature of Mughal India (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 137. Entry for a Mughal portrait of Zain Khan Koka, no. IS.91-1965, posted on the Victoria and Albert Museum website (accessed June 11, 2013).

95. Morgan Library & Museum, no. M.386.5. Repro duced on their Website: www.themorgan.org/collections/ works/Islamic/manuscriptEnlarge.asp?page=66 (accessed June 11, 2013).

96. Joan Cummins, ‘‘Awash in Meaning: Literary Sources for Early Pahari Bathing Scenes,’’ in A Celebration of Love: The Romantic Heroine in the Indian Arts, ed. Harsha V. Dehejia (New Delhi: Roli Books, 2004), 156–57.

97. The page includes a yellow panel of text with a verse from Bhanudatta’s Rasaman˜jari. In a private collec tion, the painting relates to a well-known early-seventeenth century Rasaman˜ jari at the National Museum, New Delhi, which is thought to have been produced in Mewar. The artist and text are the same, but the frame has blue cartouches that do not appear on the National Museum folios. For more on this manuscript, see Andrew Topsfield, Court Painting at Udaipur, Artibus Asiae Supplementum XLIV (Zurich: Artibus Asiae, 2007), 57–58. The bather is not the heroine of the illustrated verse, but one of her friends. The heroine stands center, brushing at what she thought was a lotus at the corner of her eye. For a trans lation of the verse, see Sheldon Pollock, ed. and trans., ‘‘Bouquet of Rasa’’ and ‘‘River of Rasa’’ by Bha¯ nudatta, Clay Sanskrit Library 41 (New York: New York Uni versity Press and JJC Foundation, 2009), 8–9. Sheldon Pollock has posted the painting, which belongs to the National Museum of New Delhi, together with the rest of the manuscript on the Clay Sanskrit Library website: http://www.claysanskritlibrary.org/volume-v-38.html; select ‘‘view Udaipur Miniatures’’ (accessed October 2012).

98. A reproduction of the painting can be found at http://www.claysanskritlibrary.org/volume-v-38.html; select ‘‘view Udaipur Miniatures’’ under ‘‘Bouquet of Rasa’’ and ‘‘River of Rasa’’ and look for the painting that illustrates verse 42. (accessed October 2012).

99. Pollock, ‘‘Bouquet of Rasa,’’ 40–41.

100. Ibid., 24–25.

101. The Jahangirnama, 452–53.

102. Busch, Poetry of Kings, 94.

103. Ibid., 140.

104. Ibid., 140–41.

105. Deborah Hutton, Art of the Court of Bijapur (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006), 83–96; Debra Diamond, ‘‘Magical Imagination (wahm) and His torical Reception: The Yogini Paintings of Bijapur,’’ talk presented at College Art Association, February 2011, New York.

106. Cited in Katherine Brown, ‘‘Reading Indian Music: The Interpretation of Seventeenth-Century European Travel Writing in the (Re)Construction of Indian Music History,’’ British Journal of Ethnomusicology 9, no. 2 (2000): 24. Of course, the women may have been imitating a pictorial conceit rather than the other way around.

107. Toby Falk and Mildred Archer, Indian Minia tures in the India Office Library (London: Sotheby Parke Bernet, 1981), cat. 12iv.

108. I base these conclusions on Alasdair Watson’s initial findings. Curator of Middle Eastern and Islamic Manuscripts at the Bodleian Library, he is currently en gaged in translating and interpreting these pages.

109. Nur-ud-din Abd-ur-Rahman Jami, Lawa¯ ’ih˙: A Treatise on Sufism, trans. E. H. Whinfield and Mirza Mu hammad Kazvini (London: Royal Asiatic Society, 1906), 36.

110. Rosalind O’Hanlon, ‘‘Manliness and Imperial Service in Mughal North India,’’ Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 42, no. 1 (1999): 51.

111. Rajeev Kumar Kinra, ‘‘Secretary-Poets in Mughal India and the Ethos of Persian: The Case of Chandar Bhan Brahman,’’ PhD diss., University of Chicago, 2008, 196. On Mughal sociability, see also O’Hanlon, ‘‘Manliness and Imperial Service,’’ 47–93; and Mana Kia, ‘‘Contours of Persianate Community’’ PhD diss., Harvard University, 2011.

112. O’Hanlon, ‘‘Manliness and Imperial Service,’’ 66. 113. For example, the Jami verses cited above from Nur-ud-din ‘Abd-ur-Rahman Jami’s Lawa¯ ’ih˙. 114. Ebeling, Ragamala Painting, 120.

115. Ibid., 124.

116. Abu al-Fazl, A‘in-i Akbari, Vol. III, 263–65. 117. Schofield, ‘‘Reviving the Golden Age,’’ 495. 118. Brown, ‘‘Hindustani Music,’’ 192, notes this

association in the Sangitaratnakara of Sarngadeva, circa 1250.

119. Ibid., 200.

120. Ibid., 223.

121. Rima Hooja, A History of Rajasthan (New Delhi: Rupa & Co., 2006), 546.

122. Allison Busch, personal communication. 123. David Roxburgh, Prefacing the Image: The Writ ing of Art History in Sixteenth-Century Iran (Leiden: Brill, 2000), 3.

124. Kinra, ‘‘Secretary-Poets,’’ 256.

125. Ibid., 270.

126. Ibid., 190–91.

127. Hooja, A History of Rajasthan, 547.

128. Busch, Poetry of Kings, 163.

129. Schofield, ‘‘Reviving the Golden Age,’’ 494.