211. A Beautiful World: The Art of Akbar

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0:29Hello and welcome to Empire with me Anita Arnhem. And me, William Dribble. The reason we may be a little bit out of breath is because we've been laughing very, very loudly about Cal's pep talk just before we came into this. We're very lucky to have Cal. No, no, no, it's very good. It was a very acute observation, which is you're talking about pretty things. Just describe them. To paraphrase, basically don't make this episode shit because that was our plan. We're very lucky to have a producer like Carl. Without his sterling advice, who knows how this podcast could end up. So look, previously, doing the little wavy motion, previously on this podcast, we've been talking about Akbar, the Mughal emperor who took a template, ripped it up, threw it into the air.

1:15Every place that one bit of confetti landed, he made his empire. And well, I mean, I sort of described at the end of the last episode that he'd created a hippie commune where peace and love, man, And just don't be awful was the credo. On a sort of pan-Indian basis. And now we're going to talk about how he covered it with nice murals and things. Yes, nice murals. And not just, you know, describing the murals. Thank you, Cal. We'll do that. Thanks. But also, the reason that he was able to have such a pretty empire and, you know, where art makes such great strides and music and poetry and things like that is because he attracts these artists from other parts of the world and other parts of India.

1:58all come to his court because it is a hippie commune. So they'll be loved. So joking apart, what happens at this period, extraordinary. There had been a remarkable tradition of painting in ancient India, of which the Ajanta Caves is the most spectacular example, but most of it's lost. And India was not particularly renowned in the early Middle Ages during the period of the Delhi Sultanate for its painting, or particularly, I think on a global sense, it's architecture. But what you get happening during the reign of Akbar turns that around. And we see some of the greatest paintings and some of the greatest buildings of the age built at this time.

2:38And I think part of it always stems from the fact that Akbar was dyslexic and so was a very visual child. I think this is so interesting that he thought in pictures rather than words from the earliest moment. We talked about that in the previous episode, that he had the phenomenal memory that struck everybody around him. And it's because he saw the world, not through the pages of a book, necessarily. Exactly. And his father, Humayun, who was also very interested in architecture and in art, recognised this. And he talks about how Akbar loved painting as a child, and how he would practice painting in the imperial studio, tutored by master painters.

3:20So Humayun brings these Persian painters from Iran. And it's at that time that you have them beginning to mix with Gujarati painters, probably the Jain tradition. And you have these two very different worlds meeting for the first time. And you've also got to remember that in Orthodox Islam, there are some who dislike painting and think it's against Quranic injunctions. And Akbar very early on makes it clear he has no time for this sort of attitude. He says... Before you quote him, though, explain that a little bit, because in the Quran... Hadiths, I think. ...to paint the human form or to have the temerity to put yourself up on the same pedestal as God himself, who is the one who created mankind, is one of the worst things that you can do.

4:08So Abul Faisal records the young Akbar's response to that sort of attitude. He has Akbar saying, There are many that hate painting, but such men I dislike. It appears to me as if a painter had a quite peculiar means of recognizing God. For a painter in sketching anything that has life, and in devising its limbs one after another, must come to feel that he cannot bestow individuality upon his work, and is thus forced to think of God, the giver of life. So this shows not only his aesthetic awareness, but also what a kind of individual thinker he is from when he's a child. While he couldn't read, he loved to have literature read to him, almost like a sort of audio book.

4:55And there were these court performers who specialized in reciting the epics at court when he was a child. And some of these epics are the Indian epics, and some of these epics are the Islamic epics. Some, like the Hamza Nama, are an Indian version of the Islamic epics, which sort of contain a bit of both. So he would have had Ferdazi in his mind, the Persian poet we've talked about previously in our Persian series. Imagine him, sort of young Akbar, lying with his eyes closed with some of the greatest performers in the land, reciting poetry and stories to him. And he would have imagined all of these things again in pictures.

5:32Susan Strong, who we're going to have on this series, has an observation about this. She says it's one of the biggest paradoxes of art history, that the prolific production of illustrated manuscripts was initiated by a man who couldn't read them himself. Very nicely put. Very nicely put. Sue is the curator of the extraordinary show at the Victorian Albert Museum. And anyone who is in London or passing through London in the next few months should make a beeline to that because it is one of the greatest assemblages of Mughal goodies ever brought together in one place. It's an extraordinary, extraordinary show.

6:05So let's just go through some of the areas which Akbar and his court sort of specialised in. Well, the first is something that first brought us together, which is Akbar's love of gemstones. Tell us about that. We talked about this with Koh-i-Noor, but there was a different taste and hierarchy in the Mughal court for gemstones. Diamonds were really pretty near the bottom, but right at the top, it would have been spinels and rubies, redstones. Redstones, yeah. Redstones, which captured sort of the setting rays of the sun or as the sun rises. That was the most beautiful, beautiful moment in the day and also the most beautiful stones.

6:41And there was no shortage of this. You know, you've got these deep pink spinels from Badakhshan, which is in his own back garden, if you like. But you've got the stones, but you need to cut the stones. And to cut the stones, you need to recruit the greatest gem experts across the subcontinent. And they come from both Hindus and Muslims. I mean, even today, Surat in Gujarat is known as the diamond cutting center of Asia. You still have generations who've cut diamonds in Surah. But foreigners were also recruited because, you know, you want the best of the best and you want the money to pay them.

7:16So at this point, it's interesting. These talents go backwards and forwards between East and West. There are periods of history when the Mughals are ahead of everyone else. But at the beginning of Akbar's reign, I think the Venetians are the greatest stonecutters in the world, along with the Dutch in Amsterdam. And so even the English who are first making their way to the Mughal court at this time have some skills that the Mughals don't. So there's two Englishmen we know of in some of the earlier accounts. William Leeds, who arrives with a group of English merchants in 1584 that includes the writer Ralph Fitch.

7:49And they arrive at Fatipur Sikri with a letter to Akbar from Queen Elizabeth I. And they bring with them gem experts, one of whom gets recruited into the court. And Abel Faisal is fascinated by this and writes about the incredible amount of gemstones which have been gathered at this point. He says, the amount of revenues in our empire is so great and the business so multifarious that 12 treasuries are necessary for storing the money, nine for the different kinds of cash payments, and three for precious stones, gold, and inlaid jewelry. And the rubies and spinels are divided into 12 classes. There are diamonds, half the quantity of spinels and rubies, and then there are emeralds of blue corundum or sapphires, which the Mughals knew as yakuts and pearls were kept in a third treasury.

8:39So there's this whole world of gemology and gemstones. And as we'll see in a later episode, Shah Jahan, the grandson of Akbar, considers that these stones are being wasted, that they're not being put to active use. They're just being amassed in the treasury. And he comes up with a very ingenious way of using them for state purposes. But that's for a later episode. So we'll come to that later. And we'll also tell you sort of stories of Mughal emperors who just ignore all the dancing and music that goes around them because they're too busy looking at piles of jewels. It was a particular fascination of the family.

9:15Absolutely right. Sort of plate full of jewels which arrive with dinner and they're just looking at those rather than eating or talking to anybody who's in their court. And one of the reasons at this time, even, and again, we'll go to Abul Fasal for this because he's a contemporaneous source who sees this happening, is that there is a link between these gemstones and divinity. As we sort of talk about in the Koh-I-Noor episode, there's a conflation between the Koh-I-Noor and the Siamantica gem, which is this gem of mythology, which used to belong to the sun god. Well, so all gems are gifts from the gods.

9:48And Abba Fassol says, kings are fond of external splendor because they consider it an image of the divine glory. So being bedecked in all of this bling is not just to show, look how rich I am, but it is look how close I am to the divine. Look upon me and turn your eyes away because I sparkle so much. And that is the experience you'd have looking into the face of a god. And gemstones, of course, in this world related to the production of books. because it's gemstones which are ground up to produce many of the pigments. So, for example, lapis lazuli, where the blue pigment comes from, and the various other mineral paints, such as malachite, which are ground.

10:27So next door to the gemstones in Abul Faisal's scheme is the House of Books. And this is where manuscripts are created, stored, and where calligraphers, artists, bookbinders, and guilders are employed. And we get the impression, I think, that at the time of Humayun, there were certainly artists around. But what you have now at this far more organized court of Akbar and far richer court of Akbar is a sort of book factory, which has got a whole professional setup under a series of Persian masters who are training up local Indian painters in techniques. And the result is you're getting two different worlds.

11:10The world of Jain Gujarati art, which is very colourful and full of animal pictures and bright primary colours. And then the far more restrained formal world of Persian art with its geometric ornament, far more restrained use of colour and form. But detailing as well. You associate with Mughal miniature painting in particular. every expression on every face on the painting is different entirely obsessed with detail so fingernails and the cuticles I mean it just gets down to the very finest point of brush painted with a squirrel's tail and my wife Olivia is trained in this tradition she she trained in Jaipur 20 years ago and one of the things they taught her is the art of catching your squirrel Really?

12:03I'm not making this up Has she ever caught a squirrel? She has I'm never going to look at her the same way again So the whole thing is that you're not obviously allowed to kill the squirrel In this tradition, which is based partly on Jane painting So you have to bait a trap It doesn't hurt the squirrel in any way But you catch the squirrel, then you get a kind of pillow slip And you have to learn to hold the squirrel with its tail coming out between your two forefingers and then you're allowed to take one single hair from one squirrel, which you use for doing the finest detail. And the squirrel has to not be hurt and has to be let go or else the paintings will die is the law of the painter.

12:42Oh, that's amazing. So how many nutkins has she nabbed, that wife of yours? I mean, it can't be easy. That's the sort of question you might have to ask her directly. A sort of squirrel kidnapper, your wife, I had no idea. But the thing is, if you have this capability and you have these factories, for want of a better word, you have this master and all of these acolytes who are training and working around the clock to learn this technique, you can produce books that haven't been produced before. And Akbar, in particular, has become obsessed with stories. He loves stories. So, you know, in the oral tradition, there are the tales of Hamza, who battles with demons and unbelievers.

13:21And it's an oral thing that he's grown up with in his ears, but he wants to make it into a picture book. And it is a remarkable achievement. Talk about the Hamza Nama. So there is a whole world that is still alive in India of what are called picture showmen. And they exist in different traditions. There's some who walk from village to village in Bengal with the stories of the Baals and the stories of Krishna. But there's also Muslim traditions that also still exist in Iran. And the Tales of Hamza is one of these. And these picture showmen walk from village to village. They set up a stall and they show images from, like showing slides, but showing images from the story.

14:05But what Akbar has in mind is not the kind of crude things that village picture showman will have, but to have a great imperial book of Hamza, which will collect all these stories together. And the Hamza Nama, unlike the Mahabharata, has never had a sort of final and definitive edition. It is emphatically an oral story, and it's a great miscellany of folk tales, legends, religious discourses, and sort of far-side yarns, which over time came to gather around the story of the hero, Hamza ibn Abdul Muttalib, the father-in-law of the prophet. And as perfits an epic, the factual backbone of the story was in due course swamped with subplots and digressions involving a sort of Narnia cast.

14:55Witches and dragons and giants and demons and flying carpets and, you know, all of this stuff of sort of Arabian Nights plus Game of Thrones plus. And flying pots. Oh, yes. Flying pots are the equivalent of flying carpets in the Hums and Armour. People jump into magic pots and go shooting around. And above all, you have the handsome, courageous, and chivalrous Hamza and his chaste and beautiful Persian princess lovers. And then there's the kind of Lord Voldemort of the story, the cruel necromancer and archfiend, Zamorad Shah, who's called The Lost. And he's shown as a sort of suave, black-bearded giant with a huge nose and a cruel and malevolent expression in his eyes.

15:38Anyway, this project commissioned by Akbar brings together more than 100 artists to produce 1 ,400 illustrations. And although it's not sort of intended to do this, to create an atelier large enough to produce this enormous body of work, this is the moment that mogul painting really begins. because you have to bring together these guys. You actually have to train them up in a formal and organised fashion. And they do it. And you see mogul art being born as you look through the pages of this book. Some of the pages are in the V &A at the moment and on display. So if you are in London or passing, do not miss your chance to see the Hams and Amour pages.

16:20And for those of you who aren't able to do that, just to give you an idea of what these pictures are like, they are not your children's storybook pictures. They are involved and intricate and they have casts of hundreds sometimes in them. I'm just looking at a couple now. There's a beautiful one, the spy Zanbur, bringing Mahia to the city of Tawarik. It's got a woman with a flowing headscarf. You can see all the folds in her headscarf on top of a donkey, not the only donkey in the picture. There are three donkeys in the picture. but it's what's going on incidentally around her. It's about her coming to the city.

16:54But there are panniers of fruit. There are people in windows gossiping with each other. The colours, I mean, you say they're muted, but they are beautiful and bright and vivid. There's emerald colour on the roof shingles of a house. You've got the intricate mosaics on an onion dome in front. You've got someone just looking up, someone just gazing out of the window, having a little daydream. and people who are not involved in the story at all, but who are in the picture itself. So you can understand that somebody who maybe is illiterate or dyslexic could see, look, I can understand this story. I'm in a world.

17:28I'm inhabiting a world. Also, the Hamza Nama does a very good job of doing water. So you've got these rippling scenes of rippling water and people who are half in and half out. And you can see that painting is making enormous strides during this period. You've got land, sea, sky, all being dealt with in a beautiful, textured and new way of doing paintings. And it causes a great stir at the time. You have accounts from Akbar's court of the progress of this project. Everyone's looking and watching and waiting for the new images to come out so they can hear their favourite episodes of the story. And we have one chronicler from the time, he's called Mir Allah al-Daula.

18:09He says, verily, it is a book the likes of which no connoisseur has seen since the azure sheets of the heavens were decorated with brilliant stars. Nor has the hand of destiny inscribed such a book on the tablet of the imagination, since the disks of the celestial sphere gained glamour with the appearance of the moon and the sun. And that's very much the kind of high fluton's court tone, by the way. The writing in Akbar's court is all of that sort of very high Persianate nature. And no one has mastered it more than Akbar's hagiographer, Abul Faisal, who actually records extensive details by individual artists and is especially proud of the way that the Persian masters of the Atelier had to train up ordinary Indians.

18:57And this is how he puts it, so that novices have become masters. And one of these is a guy called Daswanta. We learn a great deal about him. He was the son of a palanquin bearer who was in the service of the court. So in ordinary, you know, like a porter, he's from the lowest ranks of the court. But urged by natural desire, he used to draw images and designs on the walls. One day, the far-reaching glance of his majesty Akbar fell on those things, and its penetrating manner discerned the spirit of a master working in them. Consequently, his master entrusted Daswatha to the master of the atelier, and in just a short time, he became matchless in his skills.

19:35There was, however, a sad ending to this prodigy. Insanity shrouded the brilliance of his mind and he died a suicide. Isn't that wonderful, that story though? The idea of this guy being picked up and becoming a master. Picked up in the middle. Some may find him to be a madman who's just scratching and scrolling away, but somebody sees the genius. I mean, he's one of so many artists who worked on the Hamza Nama. And in total, Akbar commissions no fewer than 1 ,400 huge illustrations for the Hamza Nama. And this is the single largest commission in all Mughal history. It is an enormous undertaking.

20:11When you look at the Hamza Nama, even today, because you're an art connoisseur, what do you see when you look at these paintings? Funnily enough, there was an exhibition just of the Hamza Nama at the V &A about 20 years ago. And I think that was the first time I ever wrote an art historical review in The Guardian, 20 or 25 years ago. And it was of the Hamza Nama. And I've got my review in front of me. Oh, have you? All right. What did you say? Tell us what you said. Some of the illustrations are very Persian in style, flat, linear forms remarkable for their precise, angular, geometric perfection.

20:43Other pages are pure Indian in spirit. There are Indian clothes and Indian gestures. The palette is brighter and more dramatic than is common in Persian art. And there is a love of the natural world that is very specific to the subcontinent. The playful elephants that charge across the canvases of the Hamza Nama seem to have arrived straight off the walls of Hindu rock sculpture Mahabalipuram. But already the canvases of the Hamza Nama, you can see these two worlds beginning to fuse. You can hear the soft ripping of Gossamer as holy Mughal images emerge fully formed from the chrysalis of Akbar's atelier.

21:19That's not bad for a 25-year-old, is it? That is not bad at all. I'd rather please do that. What was I going to say? Progeny. No, prodigy. You. Not progeny. You prodigy. And I knew, knew, you were very, very clever. I don't know, words are failing me. It is beautifully written. The Hamza Namah is not the only thing that's being produced. You have other books that are being produced in the House of Books, but more than that, you have a style that is being produced in the House of Books, a style that is going to be known as the Mughal style. All who come after will follow and try and imitate, but none will be as generous in their commissioning and give such importance to art as Akbar.

22:00Well, let's take a break there because painting is one thing. gemstones are one thing, but what about the really big stuff? Let's talk about the stuff that still remains that if you are a tourist, you will go and see if you go to India, the architecture.

22:18Welcome back. So we were talking about gemstones, we were talking about paintings, we were talking about books, but the stuff that the Mughal Empire is, I don't know, perhaps largely known as is for the architecture that was a particular Mughal style. Tell us a little bit about that and how that style emerges. Well, you can see the different eras of Akbar's reign in the different places he rules from. Basically, he starts in Agra. Agra Fort is begun by Akbar, and I think the external walls are largely Akbar's work even today. Then he goes and builds this extraordinary city in Fatahpur Sikri. That's what we're going to be talking about most of the rest of this episode.

22:59Because Fatahpur Sikri is Akbar's great experiment, not only in philosophy, but also reflecting that philosophy in art and architecture. And finally, you see the end of his reign, he moves up. Remember, we talked at the end of last time about how he conquers Kashmir, the focus of his reign begins to move more north and westwards towards Afghanistan and Kashmir. So he moves to Lahore for the final part of his reign. And in the Lahore fort, you can see other Akbari buildings. But the one that is completely intact and entirely from Akbar's reign, and the place where in a sense you can get an idea of what it must have been like to have been around at this time, is Fatipur's secret.

23:42Life's about an hour outside Agra, which itself is about three hours drive these days south of Delhi. And it's this city built around the Sufi shrine where Akbar's favorite Sufi holy man predicted correctly the birth of Akbar's son, Salim, who will become the next emperor, Jahangir. And the Sufi shrine still remains there at the top of the hill with the family still intact inside it. And this family have seen their remote hilltop become the center of the empire. Then when the water ran out and political necessity meant Akbar had to go off to Lahore just as quickly, the site is deserted. And although it continues up until the 18th century, 90 % of what you see at Fatipur's Secret was built during Akbar's reign.

24:35There's a beautiful observation made by Bamba Gascoigne, who's written a wonderful book about the moguls and he says you know what strikes you most about Fatabur Sikri is that they appear to be wooden houses but created of stone meaning the intricacy of the carvings things like jali work which would have been screens of wood like a lace work almost a lattice work so fine and so precise that you can imagine woodworkers you know master carpenters carving are now being carved and chiseled out of stone but with such fine detailing that's the thing about this and And I think that's what he means by this.

25:09It's a spiritual sort of wound up in all of this because with the gemstones and everything else, there is a divinity thing at work there. Is that the same in the architecture? So what he's trying to do in the architecture, and again, scholars sort of dispute this and there are articles written in both directions. But what he seems to be doing is just like you've seen in his military policy, he's brought the Rajputs in alongside the Mughals, just like he's created in the center of Atiposikri, this house of religion where the different proponents of Islam and Hinduism and Jainism and Zoroastrianism can all put their case.

25:43So in the architecture, you seem to have consciously a mixture of the Muslim traditions of Central Asia, where the Mughals are from, the extraordinary architecture of places like Samarkand and so on, mixed with particularly the Gujarati forms, because remember he's just conquered Gujarat. And apparently Akbar was particularly taken with the extraordinary Indo-Islamic architecture developed by the sultans of Ahmedabad and Gujarat. And so you see this in the architecture of Fatih Bussi, as if he's trying to translate his spiritual ideas into stone, consciously combining Hindu and Muslim elements in this sort of highly syncretic fusion style, mixing the Arch and Dome of Islam with the Jali screens and Chaja eaves and Chaturis of Hinduism.