The Brush of Insight: Artists and Agency at the Mughal Court

Presented in the neat, easy-to-use, highly portable quarto format, Yael Rice's The Brush of Insight is an accessible and much-needed work that contextualizes the nature, function, and purpose of paintings and illustrated books in Mughal India and opens several new doors for scholarship on the arts of the book in the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Mughal world. This review reflects on the book’s engagement with debates in Mughal art history and situates its key themes within the relevant historiographical context.Written with great sensitivity, Brush of Insight examines the role played by painters and paintings in the construction of imperial power during the reigns of emperors Akbar (r. 1556–1605) and Jahangir (r. 1605–1627). It investigates the reasons driving the rise of the visual in Mughal court culture, presenting painters, workshops, and illustrated books as agents, spaces, and objects that played a critical, agentive role in motoring the deep social embedment of images and image-making in the practice of power in early modern north India. Thus adding to art-historical scholarship on painting and politics in the period and region, the book takes the discussions of such scholars as Milo Beach, Ebba Koch, Azfar Moin, and Catherine Asher forward by tangibly answering how and why patron and painters, workshop and court, became connected, and by fleshing out the factors, processes, and spaces within which the visual became “symbolic” and “material substitutes” for the emperor's body in four succinct chapters (112). In doing so, it shows how both the making and makers of the Mughal illustrated book enforced and shaped ideals of sacred kingship and messianic power in the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Mughal court, emphasizing the artist's agency in that process with analytic and historical rigor, and frames those developments within a dynamic, intersubjective methodological apparatus that is sure to be of great significance for all art historians regardless of their chosen field or area of expertise. Facilitating a deeper, situated understanding of the “image” (taswir) in pre-colonial north India, Brush of Insight offers new perspectives into the relation between aesthetics and power in the Mughal world. Most important, it shows us why and how pictures came to matter in this powerful empire in early modern South Asia.Chapter 1 begins by turning to Jahangir's court and examining the rise of “dream painting,” a new form of court portraiture in which the master painters Bichitr and Abu'l Hasan at the imperial taswirkhane (painters’ workshop) recorded and interpreted the emperor's various journeys in the oneiric realm. As Rice notes, the painting there becomes a testament and witness to the emperor's meetings (while fast asleep) with saints and kings both dead or alive. Using Azfar Moin's recent scholarship on sacred kingship1 as a historiographical frame from which to contextualize these paintings, Rice defines these paintings as “records” that exemplified the emperor's mastery and dominion over the subterranean world of images (‘alam al-mithal) and the terrestrial worlds (23). Painters represented his command over the two worlds through figural objects such as the globe, as Heike Franke recently noted in her study of Jahangiri and Akbari imperial portraiture,2 and also, as Rice adds, through the materiality of the book, whose form and format became a key part of the apparatus through which painters signified and commented on their emperor's exalted status, skills, and abilities. As expressions of Jahangir's “cosmological gifts,” she argues that these paintings should not be viewed as isolated cases, as seen in prior scholarship, but rather as pictures that point to the rising status and importance of image-makers and images in the seventeenth-century Mughal world. Furthermore, their textured understanding of the relationship between word and image, the visual and the material, also points to the emergence of a distinct, localized conception of the image that requires us to go beyond our current Eurocentric art-historical rubrics of signifier-signified as we engage with and try to understand these works.Forming part of what Murad Mumtaz recently called an Indo-Islamic “ontology of the image,”3 Rice's analysis of dream painting situates Mughal court painting within the above paradigm, emphasizing the pervasiveness of this conceptual framework within Jahangir's imperial taswirkhane. Both haptic and optic in character, she notes, painters viewed pictures and illustrated books not simply as static “works of art” but as living entities whose visuality could be seen, touched, and grasped through the eye and the body. Paintings, in this context, were indeed “think tanks” for allegory, as Ebba Koch once put it,4 but were also signs that transcended the binary of word and image, visual and material, incorporating features like scale, medium, brushwork, and even compositional techniques such as perspective within their symbolic framework. While scholars may wish to trace the origins of this framework within the workshop, focusing on how such an ontology became epistemology in the period and region, Rice emphasizes the benefits of integrating the painter's frame into our own interpretative process, showcasing the merits of considering form, format, and figure with equal weight as she presents new insights into such famed paintings as Bichitr's Jahangir Preferring a Sufi Shaykh to Kings (ca. 1615–1618) and Abu'l Hasan's Jahangir and Shah ‘Abbas I (ca. 1618).In contrast to prior scholarship on the politics of the dream painting, the chapter also shifts narratives surrounding its production and use, presenting the painter and not the patron as the maker of its symbolic frameworks. The layered symbolism of these images, Rice argues, indicates that painters exercised a great deal of agency when they interpreted their emperor's dreams, which is a point that differentiates her analyses of the above paintings from Azfar Moin's study on the same in Millennial Sovereign. Painters, Rice notes, exerted their presence through the hermeneutic act and thereby shaped how those who viewed these paintings—chiefly the emperor—looked at themselves. In contrast to Moin, Ebba Koch,5 and Amina Okada,6 for Rice it is the picture that created the architecture against which Jahangir exerted and understood his claims to sovereignty. Painters, therefore, shaped imperial conceptions of the self through the painting rather than vice versa.The argument continues those made by Asher7 and Koch, who also emphasized the importance of the visual in making distinctions between self and other in the Mughal world. It adds considerable nuance to their readings, however, by making a distinction between legitimization and legitimation in the relationship between painting and power. By highlighting the painter's role in the interpretation of the emperor's word, she emphasizes the painter's agentive role in the formation of what Abhishek Kaicker recently called “Mughal discourse of sovereignty,” thus situating the painter as an agent rather than a subject of imperial power.8 This conceptual move allows her to re-present painters—Bichitr and Abu'l Hasan, for example—as active, historical participants in the Mughal culture-power matrix who were as important as court philosophers or poets in shaping imperial notions of power. If painters were translators and paintings instruments of power, as Rice posits, future scholars may broaden the scope of inquiry by focusing on the impact of the taswikhane's ontologies of the image on Mughal literary and intellectual culture.These dream paintings also marked a rise in the status of painters to the level of “imperial intimate” in Jahangir's imperial court. Many years ago, Milo Beach observed that Jahangiri painters, in comparison with their Akbari counterparts, developed closer social and emotional ties with their patrons, but he ascribed the shift to a change in imperial patron and taste.9 Rice sees the painter's rise as a self-conscious and gradual development that was motored by painterly activities in Akbar's taswirkhane, once again emphasizing the agency of the painter in the making of his social world.In chapter 2 Rice argues that painters self-consciously transformed the visual into a reflection of Akbar's world-conquering desires and saintly self-image through imperial illustrated manuscripts, among them Akbarnama (The Life of Akbar, illustrated 1590–95), which created the ground against which painters exerted themselves as translators and recorders of the imperial image in Jahangir's reign. Challenging received views about stylistic change and painterly agency in the sixteenth-century Mughal taswirkhane, Rice contends that the ontology of the image and the relationship developed between the visual and the political in the Jahangiri period originate from the Akbari workshop. She agrees with scholars such as Franke,10 who suggested such continuity, defining the Jahangiri imperial portrait as a reflection of the Akbari imperial image typified in manuscripts like Akbarnama. While Asher and Susan Stronge11 similarly viewed Akbari painting as a “record” of empire, they were unsure about the painter's role in that process. Scholarship thus continued to hold that the emperor was a key agent in the making of the manuscript's highly political visual language based on the claim by Akbari court historiographer Shaykh Abu'l Fazl ‘Allami (d. 1602) that the emperor essentially created the workshop's visual style. Rice rigorously challenges that account, drawing on paratextual elements such as colophons, marginalia, and inscriptions to broaden her range of primary sources to show that it was not patrons but painters themselves that motored the rise of the visual outside the workshop. Furthermore, if “style” is learned, as she suggests, it is very doubtful to have been taught by the emperor, who did not have the expertise needed to train artists and organize workflows within a workshop, let alone design the visual schemes of the Mughal painting. More likely, it was the painter who transformed the picture into an image of the times.Central to the author's argument is her definition of the term style, which allows her to shift from the observer's to the practitioner's perspective in order to focus on the workaday practices of art making that undercut artistic practice in environments like a workshop. Like Valérie Gonzalez,12 Rice is interested in practice as a generated epistemic rather than a mere aesthetic object. It is, as Rice puts it, “something that is never ‘finished’ . . . does not follow set rules, is [not] static and unchanging, but ‘is constituted and reconstituted’ by a range of actors, ‘who are themselves constituted through myriad social, material, and spatial relationships’” (80). In contrast to the connoisseurly method—which, as Gregory Minissale13 and Gonzalez also astutely observed, relies on a somewhat reductive understanding of the aesthetic—Rice presents a solution to the problem by developing an analytic approach that privileges the epistemologies that inform the maker's way of thinking rather than that of the observer.Rice's profoundly situated framework reflects an increased interest in artisanal making in the Islamic world, mirroring the approaches of Sylvia Houghteling14 and Margaret Graves,15 who have similarly examined material artifacts not only as objects of aesthetic and historical significance but as traces of the embodied knowledge and intellectual labor of their makers. While David J. Roxburgh was perhaps the first proponent of such an approach in his The Persian Album, 1400–1600: From Dispersal to Collection (2005), Rice follows a path set out by art historians—John Seyller among them—that goes beyond the literary to the paratext to reconstruct the Mughal workshop's norms and values through its material imaginaries. While future scholars may look at the calligrapher's role in the making of the workshop's thought style, Rice's comparative study of the text with paratext debunks received views on the patron's role in that process, confirming Seyller's claim that the court historiographer's statements are hyperbolic. Rice observes that the workshop's internal knowledge-transmission structures were comparatively dynamic and de-centered, illustrating that their centralized control, as implied by Abu'l Fazl in his “Treatise on the Arts of Writing and Painting” (‘A'in-i Taswirkhane’, ca. 1600) was an impossibility, as painters frequently moved between projects with short timelines, thereby confirming the view of Muzaffar Alam and Sanjay Subrahmanyam that Abu'l Fazl's institutional writing is essentially prescriptive, not descriptive, in character.16 She also notes that the taswirkhane likely executed Akbarnama while the emperor was away from the imperial court, rendering Abu'l Fazl's claim almost impossible and making a strong case for shifting from the A'in to the paratext as our ur primary source text on the Mughal workshop. Rice illustrates that it was neither the patron nor the individual painter but rather the workshop itself, led by masters who guided a team of painters, that was responsible for the generation of the workshop's cosmopolitan and syncretic style. Their relationships and engagements with each other shaped the taswirkhane's politically rich visual language, allowing painters (and not patrons) to transform painting into the language of power.The definition of style presented in this chapter opens several doors for future scholarship and expands our understanding of knowledge-transmission structures between court and workshop. The importance paid to disciplinary distinctions in styles of thinking indicates that knowledges between those two realms also developed in parallel with one another. Nonetheless, the presence of convergences and divergences between the painter's thinking and that of the patron suggests that knowledge-formation was not only cross-cultural, as Alam, Subrahmanyam, and Audrey Truschke17 have discussed, but also cross-disciplinary in character, indicating that power and sovereignty, for example, were equally heterogeneous objects produced by diverse communities of knowers in spaces such as the imperial workshop. In the context of the court and the taswirkhane, future research might look into the modalities by which such interdisciplinary knowledge exchange took place in the period, where painters had, in contrast to their Jahangiri successors, less social mobility and access to the imperial court. The role played by court-workshop intermediaries, multilingualism, and spaces such as the workshop will be significant here and further flesh out intersections between the philosophical and the pictorial, and the political and the visual, in Mughal court culture. These are roads that Rice paves with this remarkable chapter.Chapters 3 and 4 shift in perspective and focus on the modalities and contexts in which paintings functioned as tools for the legitimation and legitimization of imperial power in the Mughal world. The former continues Rice's analysis of the relation between painting and politics based on paradigms established in chapter 2. Used and perused during public events such as the courtly gathering (majlis; darbar) or the court's annual Nawruz (New Year) celebrations, this chapter investigates precisely how portraits, illustrated books, and visual albums became critical to the performance of the emperor's authority, knowledge, and power in the Akbari and Jahangiri imperial order. Tracing a painterly interest in physiognomic detailing in the Akbari workshop with the appearance of a local ocular visual in the Mughal court, she shows how painterly with the of the body and the material world with and shaped imperial approaches to the practice of on the interest in by the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Mughal court, Rice to the scholarship of and who have similarly on the interest in the world and the body in this and in the of the court painter they have how his paintings an that them from the of and of the world. Koch views the imperial and painterly with and of and in the same period as a Jahangiri that a interest in the art of both and outside the imperial workshop. While the of those that they in in with Koch, that they were recorded from as Jahangir recorded in his ground between the two however, she adds that these a painter's interpretation of the world, an argument established in chapter 1 as she painterly agency in the hermeneutic understanding of the picture as an practices in early but a localized practice of where painters techniques to their own and the of in Mughal sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Mughal court paintings, also observed that of were not they were marked by a self-conscious at made through the interpretative as Rice also notes in this Furthermore, neither patron nor painter's as Ebba Koch once as Rice further argues, the within a The Rice posits, may be by two and and of Islamic ocular of visual that shaped practices of and inquiry in the period and She further notes as within the imperial culture-power of features such as physiognomic detailing in their was In doing so, she one of the powerful claims painting and power in Mughal painting as a political act that not only within Mughal intellectual but also shaped the very epistemologies of the eye that the Mughal court's ocular while Rice's of the Mughal practice of is highly we should also that at within the Islamic philosophical was viewed as a not an in contrast to what she suggests in chapter 4 such as and have observed that viewed as a form of and the and at but not the as a source of the other viewed such as as the of the two of epistemic its on than If we that both and became one in the Mughal as Rice suggests, this is a historical development that future scholars may wish to further and here will be that further on the work of Rice and the developing research of on the and of of among of in and South which will this in It is also that both and were highly of in the imperial court and a understanding of what they The Rice observes between the practice of the workshop and the thinking of the court several about how this knowledge was within the workshop, it as she argues in chapter a by a style of thinking from that of outside the workshop. scholars may and on those intersections the role played by such as the and such as language in the and of intellectual between imperial court and book in chapter It to the where Rice examines its use, context, and in the Mughal world the established in it as a figure and that the emperor's from the painter's she argues that Jahangir's seventeenth-century or a point in by the developments in chapters 2 and a great deal of to our scholarship on the form and of that Rice goes beyond the problem of its sources and and for than two examines what it us about power in the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Mughal court. to and were key features of Mughal court as Rice further adds, they to the material field of the visual contrast to Beach, who on the Rice on its haptic and illustrates that its schemes are not simply but in It is the that through the as she with her analyses of the in this through the the painter on the the of the becomes an that the maker and and as and have also in the early modern Islamic context, to the importance of the in seventeenth-century Mughal visual also observes that the form and format the workshop drawing on analyses of the to the of their and within the Mughal workshop for the first in She expands on his illustrating how painters and transformed these practices in the Mughal workshop, and points to their agency in integrating these artisanal frameworks. scholarship might further how the Rice's such as master in the making of the visual may also be the in the and the to which they to or the she which in might the styles of thinking that the whose production imperial The between the painter's and that of the patron also as Rice in chapter to the of painter and patron in the Jahangiri period, mirroring the relationship between art makers and in the the comparatively visual however, illustrates their emotional embedment within each social By focusing on the for the first in scholarship through the analytic she through Brush of she of a whose scholars In doing so, she the importance of style in understanding the nature, function, and purpose of books in the Mughal world. As both a and of a and Mughal paintings were living entities and that on a distinct, epistemic in their own objects through which their makers and relationships with and Rice's Brush of Insight offers a and significant study on Mughal visual that new on the between aesthetics and power in the period and region, highlighting the importance of art makers in the making of the and values against which those in power at and understood themselves. It the merits of thinking beyond the text and historians and art historians to the Indo-Islamic image from a new analytic and with and this opens new for on intersections between aesthetics and power in the period and region, and will be an for future of scholars and