Awraq-e Musavvir, Mughal Art of Portraiture: The Intellectual Context and Content

The author shows how the Mughal rulers were not just patrons of art and culture, in the sense of providing resources, but connoisseurs as well, and consciously, as policy, enabled the assimilation of imperial aspirations with cultural creative cultural practices.

Nuzhat Kazmi explores the narratives reflected in portraiture in relation to landscape, gender, sovereignty. She underlines, in the process, the adaptation of the European realistic idiom for historical narrative portraiture.

As her work shows, the Mughal portraiture blends earlier, ancient art practices, of the sub continent and central Asia with European influences of the period to create an interesting idiom, disabusing us of prejudiced views that see influences of Islam as negative and sectarian. Moghal portraiture itself, as she shows us, breaks the myth that Islam has been firmly opposed to depictions of the human and other living forms.

In its clear and well-founded arguments, the book makes significant contribution to scholarship.

Written in an easy flowing language, the art techniques simply explained, the book would be enjoyable reading for art historians, students and for the layperson interested in art or in a sensible view of the Mughal era.

Contents

Foreword by BN Goswamy
Introduction
Portraiture in the Islamic Artistic Milieu
Mughal Portraiture: The Historical Context and Content
Mughal Historical Pictorial Narratives and the Art of Portraiture
Mughal Pictorial Imperial Iconography and its Unique Trajectory
Mughal Portraiture and the Landscape
The Female, the Gender and the Mughal Portraiture
Conclusion
Select Bibliography
Index

The author

Nuzhat Kazmi is Professor and Founder Head, Department of Art History and Art Appreciation, Faculty of Fine Arts, Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi. Her work is widely anthologized in volumes on art history, Mughal art and the European influences on late medieval and early modern Indian art. She is the author of Islamic Art: The Past and the Modern (2009).

From the Foreword

Again and again in this study, both context and content are examined. The interest in dynastic histories, the pride taken in descent from iconic ancestors, the relationships between different classes and categories of people, the role of gender and the issues both of the portraiture of women and of female painters, the impact of naturalism that came in with European works: with eyes that stay wide open and remain filled with curiosity, these things keep coming under purview in this plentifully documented study. One after another. – B.N. Goswamy