Miniature painting, two lines

A Mughal miniature is about the size of a hand. It is painted on paper made of several sheets pasted together and burnished until the surface is hard enough to take a line finer than a hair, with a brush made from a single squirrel bristle. It is meant to be looked at closely, by one or two people at a time, and then put back inside a binding.

This is the format that both of the traditions in this entry inherited, and it is worth stating at the start because it explains a great deal of what is in the pictures. A painting this small cannot be a wall. It has no room for atmosphere and no need for perspective; it is read at the distance of a book. So the painter's problem is not how to fill space but how to make a scene legible in a rectangle you can cover with your palm.

Five hands to one folio

The Mughal workshop — the tasvirkhana — was an industrial operation, and the word is not an exaggeration. Akbar's atelier from the 1560s employed on the order of a hundred artists, working under masters, on manuscripts commissioned in sets. The Hamzanama, begun around 1562, ran to fourteen volumes and roughly fourteen hundred large illustrations; about a tenth survives. Later projects were more tightly supervised and more expensive per page.

The work was divided by skill. One hand laid out the composition and drew the outlines. Another filled the flat areas of colour, working from the back of the sheet for the ground and from the front for the figures. A third — the face specialist, often the most senior man in the room — painted the features, which in a portrait might be the only individually observed element on the page. A fourth applied gold. A calligrapher, working on the reverse, set the text that the picture illustrates.

The court that wanted to look

Mughal painting is an argument about observation. The atelier's prestige projects were chronicles — the Akbarnama, the Baburnama — illustrated with scenes of court, battle, hunt and construction, in which the emperor appears at a plausible age and the courtiers are recognisable. Alongside them ran a tradition of individual portraiture and of natural history: Ustad Mansur painting a dodo, a chameleon, a pair of sarus cranes, from life, in the 1610s.

This is an unusual thing for a court to pay for. The purpose was partly documentary — these are records of events, made by people who were present — and partly ideological: a ruler who is painted accurately, in a scene that is spatially coherent, is a ruler whose authority is being presented as factual rather than symbolic. The Mughals were also, being newcomers, buying legitimacy by attaching themselves to an existing high culture: the atelier also translated the Mahabharata and the Ramayana into Persian and illustrated them, producing pages where a Persian aesthetic and an Indian subject are held in the same frame.

The courts that wanted to feel

Rajput painting does something else with the same materials. Its space is flat, its colour is applied in fields, its figures are types rather than individuals, and its subject is usually a state of feeling — separation, longing, the anticipation of a monsoon. The tradition's masterpieces are not chronicles but series: sets of thirty-six or forty-two folios, each illustrating one raga of the musical system described in an earlier entry, or one month of the year.

Those two series types are worth pausing on, because they show a court using painting as a notation system. A ragamala set assigns each raga an image: a heroine waiting, a woman playing an instrument, a storm. A baramasa set assigns each month a mood and a weather. Read as a sequence, the paintings are a way to hold a musical and calendrical system in memory — the same function the tabla's syllables perform for rhythm.

Kishangarh in the mid-eighteenth century, under a painter usually named as Nihal Chand, produced the most extreme version of this: faces in profile with enormous elongated eyes, a lake, a boat, a woman whose proportions are not those of anyone who ever lived. It is devotional painting, and it is not trying to be observed.

The technique that outlived the courts

Both markets collapsed within a generation of each other. The Mughal atelier dispersed after 1707; the Rajput courts lost their revenues under British paramountcy in the nineteenth century; photography arrived and took over the documentary function; and the printing press took over the devotional one. By 1900 the workshops were producing tourist goods.

What survived was the technique, because it is teachable and it is cheap to run. Families in Jaipur, Kishangarh and a few other centres continued to size wasli, grind mineral pigment and paint to a hair's width, and they still do — now mostly for an export market that wants a Mughal garden or a Rajput horse. The craft did not die; it changed customers. Which is the same thing that happened to the dancers, the drummers and the actors in the entries before this one.

There is a harder consequence. Because a folio had four or five hands, because workshop output was collaborative and often unattributed, and because the surviving corpus is a fraction of what was made, the art market has spent a century disagreeing about attribution. The names that do survive — Mansur, Nainsukh, Nihal Chand — are the exceptions that prove the rule: in this system, most painters were not individuals but positions.

This is entry 06 of Arts & Performance in About India. The next entry moves to the largest industry in this pillar, and to a division of labour stranger than the workshop's: a performer whose voice is famous and whose face belongs to somebody else.