Paper short abstract:

This paper examines fifteenth century Persian manuscripts that underwent decorative and pictorial transformations in Mughal India. Later brought to England, these books and their paintings demonstrate the difficulty faced by Western scholars in the early twentieth century to identify them properly.

Paper long abstract:

In the field of codicology, it is not infrequent to encounter a manuscript whose production occurred through several remote steps of completion. As a very mobile object, the book indeed often travelled between distant centers of production. Thus hundreds of fifteenth and sixteenth century Persian manuscripts found their way to the Indian subcontinent. In many cases, unfinished copies were completed and/or extended in local workshops. Interestingly, the decorative and pictorial alterations gave the books another character. The object seems in a way to lose its own primary intrinsic qualities and could be seen and understood as a contemporary production of the addition.

By focusing on a few belletristic copies initially made in fifteenth century Iran, the aim of this paper is, first, to investigate the reception and transformation of these books in Mughal India. I will try to show how later addition of illustrations and changes in the overall aspect obliterated the primary aesthetic characteristics of these manuscripts, turning them visually into Indo-Persian books. At last, two Englishmen, Robert Munro Binning (1814-1891) and Robert Scott Greenshields (1858-1935), both East India Company's servants eventually gave a third life to these manuscripts as they brought them back to the British Isles. Binning and Greenshields were primarily interested in the text of the works they had acquired but the latter obviously favored illustrated items. This British encounter with "Mughalized" Persian manuscripts will provide the opportunity to re-examine how the Western burgeoning history of Persianate painting and arts of the book thrived in the first third of the twentieth century.

Paper short abstract:

This paper analyzes colonial treatments of the Persian Mahabharata, originally translated under the Mughal Emperor Akbar in the 1580s. I examine how early orientalists approached the work’s text and illustrations and thereby uncover some of their larger presumptions about Indo-Persian translations.

Paper long abstract:

In the 1580s, the Mughal Emperor Akbar sponsored the translation of the Sanskrit Mahabharata into Persian and ordered the newly-minted Mughal epic lavishly illustrated. This work was originally intended for consumption by a narrow band of imperial Mughal elites, who in turn sponsored their own illuminated copies during the seventeenth century. Many of these early manuscripts of the Persian Mahabharata came to have vibrant afterlives during the colonial period that remain wholly unexamined. Europeans first accessed the Mahabharata through its Mughal-created Persian version and moreover identified the work's illustrations as excellent specimens of Indian art. In this paper, I propose to detail colonial receptions of both the text and images of the Persian Mahabharata with particular attention to the broader assumptions about archival sources that shaped colonial encounters with Indo-Persian texts. I begin with colonial treatments of the text of the Mughal Mahabharata, including William Jones's outright dismissal of this translation and an attempt by David Price to produce his own redaction of the work. I then move into uses of the translation's images, including the display of the illustrations from the master imperial copy in Jaipur in 1883 and the subsequent publication of a catalog of this exhibition by T.H. Hendley. Last, I trace how the colonial legacy of interpreting the Mughal Mahabharata has impacted modern approaches to this translation and others Mughal Persian works today. In closing I suggest a few ways to productively move forward and better reconstruct the relationship between text and image in the Indo-Persian translations.

Paper short abstract:

Focusing on an illustrated translation of the ‘Ain-i Akbari, commissioned by Jean-Baptiste Gentil (fl. 1752-99), this paper explores the notion of visual translation and its capacity to create and shift meaning. It considers both the initial production of the manuscript and its later reception in Europe.

Paper long abstract:

In the sixteenth century, as the Mughal empire expanded under the emperor Akbar I (r. 1556-1605), his prime vizier Abu'l Fazl compiled a multi-volume encyclopedic text with statistical and narrative descriptions of India, covering topics from Indian geography to the tenets of Hinduism. Known as the 'Ain-i Akbari, or Annals of Akbar, the work proved invaluable as the emperor conquered and consolidated territory in South Asia. Two centuries later, the 'Ain-i Akbari drew the interest of European scholars, translators, and collectors.

Focusing on what I argue is one of the earliest translations of the 'Ain-i Akbari, commissioned by the French East India Company officer Jean-Baptiste Gentil (fl. 1752-1799), this paper explores the notion of visual translation and its capacity to create and shift meaning. Rather than undertake a complete and solely textual translation of the manuscript, Gentil selected particular passages, translated these from Persian into French with the help of Indian scholar-translators (munshis), and commissioned illustrations from Indian artists. I examine the extent to which the manuscript paintings exceeded their illustrative function, constituting encyclopedic and ethnographic narratives that functioned alternatively in concert with or independently of text. I also consider the way in which these images came to imbue the manuscript with new meanings, reflecting in particular on the object's reception in Europe and its subsequent classification as a "customs and manners" album. In addressing these questions, I reflect upon what is to be both elucidated and obscured, gained and lost, in the translation of Indo-Persian narratives in image and text.

Paper short abstract:

This paper examines the ragamala paintings commissioned by British official Richard Johnson c.1780 for insertion into new copies of Indo-Persian musical treatises, and asks what this episode tells us about the effect of British patronage on Indian music during the transition to colonialism.

Paper long abstract:

Since the fourteenth century the North Indian ragas have existed in dual form: as the melodic organising principle of Hindustani art music; and as aesthetic entities anthropomorphised in miniature paintings as heroes, heroines and deities. The connection between the ragas' melodic and aesthetic forms has remained an unsolved mystery since the Mughal period, when the foundational treatises of the substantive Indo-Persian tradition of musical scholarship were laid down. Like his Mughal counterparts, Richard Johnson, Deputy British Resident of Lucknow 1780-82, was a great fan of Hindustani music obsessed with establishing once and for all the true relationship between the ragas' melodic and aesthetic forms. His solution was to commission new ragamala paintings for pre-existing Indo-Persian musical treatises that were never originally intended to be illustrated. Both the act of synthesising these two separate manuscript traditions and of commissioning ragamala paintings that were non-traditional and highly eclectic in style are worthy of examination. This paper will try to establish what on earth Johnson thought he was doing in this ultimately unsuccessful experiment: was he meddling in a destructive fashion in a tradition he didn't understand; or did his innovations instead play a role in remaking Indian art music at a time of turbulance and epistemic transition? Through exploring Johnson's example, this paper will consider what odd cul-de-sacs in the history of Indian music can tell us about the role of British patronage in the transformation of musical culture from late Mughal to early colonial fields of production.