The Laud Rāgamālā Album, Bikaner, and the
Sociability of Subimperial Painting
molly emma aitken
The City College of New York
T he Mughal emperor Akbar’s mansabdārs (rank-
holders or officials) came from Hindu ˙ and Muslim
society and from around and beyond the Indian Sub-
continent. They met at the imperial court, and fought,
traveled, and socialized with one another, partaking in
an elite culture strongly inflected by the Emperor Akbar’s
policy of sulh-i kul or ‘‘peace with all.’’1 In the spirit of
this policy, ˙
˙ Akbar (r. 1556–1605) spoke Hindi as well
as Persian, flirted with indigenous practices like vegeta-
rianism, sponsored the construction of Hindu temples,
and patronized Indian rı̄ti (a tradition of court) poetry
and indigenous musical traditions like dhrupad. Among
Akbar’s courtiers were Rajput aristocrats, some of them
rulers of regional kingdoms who brought their own tra-
ditions into the mix while also embracing the broader
culture of the court. Several built ambitiously in the im-
perial style, sponsored mosques as well as temples, and
patronized paintings infused with Persian patterns and
conventions yet often rooted in Indic literature and pic-
torial conventions that predated the Mughals.2
Though the Mughal embrace of disparate cultural
forms, practices, and beliefs is especially compelling in
today’s communally tense, intermingled world, scholars
are only beginning to understand it. This essay enters
the subject through the well-known early-seventeenth-
century tome called the Laud Rāgamālā Album, now at
Oxford’s Bodleian Library. It is motivated by the dis-
covery of preparatory materials that were in the posses-
sion of artists from the Rajput court of Bikaner until the
mid-twentieth century, and that bear compositions match-
ing three pages of the Laud Album. The match opens a
new perspective on art of the period. It offers insight
into early Mughal responses to ‘‘pre-Mughal’’ painting
conventions, and it promises a new perspective on what
is called ‘‘subimperial’’ patronage, meaning patronage
by non-imperial patrons.3 The essay does two kinds
of work. Employing connoisseurship and historical con-
textualization, the first and longest portion lays the
groundwork for understanding the discovery: it revisits
the scholarship on the Laud Album, expands existing
scholarship on early Bikaner painting, and explores the
relationships that link the Laud Album to Bikaner. Part
two builds on this evidence to reorient current thinking
about early-seventeenth-century ‘‘subimperial’’ painting.
Taking an interpretive approach, this section analyzes
the place of the Rāgamālā pages in a Mughal album to
view the Laud Album as an early and richly suggestive
example of Mughal responsiveness to Rajput culture.
This final section turns to the growing literature in South
Asian art history on cultural translation, and considers
translation in the context of sociability.4
I. The Discovery
The preparatory materials in question come from about
six hundred Bikaner court artists’ workshop drawings,
sketches, pounces, and paintings, which are now in a
private collection in the United States. These works were
purchased from a late member of the Lalani Usta clan of
artists who were in service to the Bikaner court in India
from the late sixteenth until the twentieth century.5 Ex-
tensive research has given credence to the collection. As a
whole it is stylistically consistent with Bikaner painting,
numerous drawings bear inscriptions to known Bikaner
masters, and many correspond to published Bikaner
paintings. Among the early works, for example, one
fragment traces a portion of a Deccan painting that a
Bikaner ruler purchased from Bhagnagar (Hyderabad).
A drawing of a horse and rider corresponds to eques-
trian portraits of the Bikaner ruler Maharaja Anup
Singh (r. 1669–1698), one of them ascribed to the
master Ruknuddin, while a woman worshipping a Shiva
liṅga (a form of Shiva) below a tree was a model for an
eighteenth-century Bikaner painting identified as Sain-
dhavı̄ Rāginı̄. A nı̄m qalam (tinted drawing) matches a
picture of the prophet Sulaiman amid angels that bears
a Bikaner palace stamp, and a drawing of a herd of
buffalo seems to have been the basis for a hunt scene
the Bikaner artist Rashid painted for Maharaja Anup
Singh.6 A number of late-nineteenth-century preparatory
28 ARCHIVES OF ASIAN ART
Fig. 1. Hindola Rāga. India, Bikaner, early 17th c. Khāka:
˙ (warqa), reverse covered in charcoal, approx.
holes on paper
18.5  10.3 cm. Previously in the Lalani Usta family, on loan to
the Bodleian Library, Oxford.
sketches relate to portraits of the Bikaner ruler Sardar
Singh (r. 1872–1887) now at the Metropolitan Museum
of Art and the San Diego Museum of Art.7 The collec-
tion can only be what it is purported to be: the accu-
mulated workshop holdings of Bikaner’s Usta painters.
As such, it is a reliable and invaluable source of infor-
mation on Bikaner painting.8
Among the most astonishing discoveries in the col-
lection are three pinhole-pricked pieces of paper bear-
ing compositions that match three pages in the Laud
Rāgamālā Album. Their style, key motifs, and sartorial
details date them to the early seventeenth century (Figs.
Fig. 2. Gunakalı̄ Rāginı̄. Bikaner, early 17th c. Khāka: holes
˙
on paper (warqa), reverse covered in charcoal, approx.
14.8  12.8 cm. Previously in the Lalani Usta family collection,
on loan to the Bodleian Library, Oxford.
1–3). Such pricked papers were pounced with charcoal,
which transferred their compositions through the holes
onto a second piece of paper. One term for them is
charba, a Persian word that originally applied to tracing
papers, but which is sometimes used for pinhole compo-
sitions. In India, the process of pouncing is sometimes
called ‘‘khāka jharana,’’ or ‘‘pouncing of dust,’’ and
both the pounce and the pricked sheet used to make a
pounce can be called a khāka. By the mid-nineteenth
century, Bikaner’s Usta artists were using the term khāka,
and I will employ it here.9
The three khākas in question picture standard Rāga-
mālā iconography: one, Hindola Rāga, depicts a man on
˙˙
a swing surrounded by attendants (Fig. 1); the second,
Gunakalı̄ Rāginı̄, portrays a woman kneeling before a
˙
pot of curling foliage (Fig. 2); and the third, Vasanta
Rāginı̄, shows Krishna dancing in the rain with the gopı̄s
(cowherd girls) (Figs. 3, 4). Each khāka has been rubbed
with charcoal on one side, indicating it has been used.
Because of their generic iconography, I did not initially
recognize the khākas for what they were. While I was
looking at Laud Album reproductions with Shanane
 MOLLY EMMA AITKEN
Fig. 3. Vasanta Rāginı̄. Bikaner, early 17th c. Khāka: holes on
paper (warqa), reverse covered in charcoal, approx. 13  11 cm.
Previously in the Lalani Usta family collection, on loan to the
Bodleian Library, Oxford.
Fig. 4. Detail of Vasanta Rāginı̄ in Figure 3.
Davis, who has published a book on the Usta collection,
Davis perceived the match between the Usta khākas and
three compositions in the album (Figs. 6, 8, 10). The
sides of the khākas rubbed with charcoal are consistent
 Sociability of Subimperial Painting 29
Fig. 5. Hindola Rāga. Author’s reversed drawing connecting
˙ photograph of Hindola Rāga khāka. Original
dots on printed
˙ is indicated in the khāka,
reproduced in Figure 1. (Second bird
but too faintly to trace.)
with the direction of the compositions in the Laud Album,
and a visit with Davis to the Bodleian Library, which
will now keep the khākas on loan, confirmed that their
size matches the original paintings. The only differences
lie in precision and complexity: the khākas are more
finely crafted and contain elements left out of the final
paintings.
John Seyller has argued that the Laud Rāgamālā
Album was produced in the workshop of the Mughal
nobleman Abdul Rahim, who bore the title Khānkhānān
in Akbar’s court.10 Seyller attributed most of the album’s
30 ARCHIVES OF ASIAN ART
Fig. 6. Hindola Rāga. Attributed to Fazl, workshop of Abdul
Rahim, early˙ 17th c. Opaque watercolor and gold on paper
(wasli), page 38  24.6 cm. Bodleian Library, Oxford, MS. Laud
Or. 149 fol. 29a.
Rāgamālā pages to Abdul Rahim’s painter Fazl. Seyller’s
argument is precise and convincing. Our findings support
his, but enrich the story. The first question pursued here
is how khākas that ended up with Bikaner’s artists could
match paintings for Abdul Rahim.
a. The Laud Rāgamālā Album and the
Bikaner Khākas
The Archbishop Laud donated the eponymous Laud
Rāgamālā Album to Oxford’s Bodleian Library in 1640,
a year before his execution for ‘‘offences against reli-
gion.’’11 It was one of many oriental manuscripts the
archbishop gave to the library, and is said to be the first
Indian manuscript to have arrived in a western collec-
tion. The manuscript consists of eighteen illustrations
of musical modes or rāgas, twelve pictures of unrelated
subjects, and ninety-nine pages of calligraphy, a few
seemingly selected for their subject matter but many in-
cluded for their artistry. The manuscript is a muraqqa’,
a type of bound album developed in Persia that inter-
sperses paintings with pages of calligraphy.12
The abundance of Rāgamālā pages in the Laud
Album suggests they originally belonged to a com-
plete Rāgamālā series like the roughly contemporaneous
Chunar (1591), Chawand (1605), and Manley (ca. 1605–
1615) Rāgamālās. The Rāgamālā pages stand apart from
the album’s other paintings in their stylistic and thematic
consistency and as a group of related images. Whereas
the heroes and heroines of the Laud Album’s mis-
cellaneous pages mostly wear Mughal dress, those of
the Rāgamālā pages have Vaishnavite tilakas (sectarian
marks), the women wear Rajput dress, and four of
the eight fully visible men’s jāmās (upper garments) are
tied to the left in the Rajput manner (Bhibhās Rāginı̄,
Kanhara Rāginı̄, Nāta Rāginı̄, Vasant Rāginı̄).13 The
Hindu and nāyikābheda ˙ (types of heroine) iconography
of the Rāgamālā pages reinforces their cultural dissimi-
larity from the album’s otherwise Mughal- and Persian-
style contents. It seems likely that the eighteen Rāgamālā
pages were excerpted from an earlier Rāgamālā series
(for which the khākas had been produced) and inter-
spersed in the muraqqa’.
Artists have used pouncing to transfer compositions
in many cultures, but Mughal and Rajput artists proba-
bly inherited the technique from Persia. David Roxburgh
describes several types of artifact that resulted from Per-
sian pouncing processes.14 Often the Persian artist placed
a drawing over a piece of paper and pricked a sharp
stylus through its lines to transfer its composition to the
paper beneath. He then connected the pricks on the
underlying paper. This process resulted in a drawing full
of holes and a second sheet bearing a combination of
holes and indentations (where the stylus didn’t fully
penetrate the second sheet). Neither page was dirtied by
charcoal. A second method entailed placing a nearly
transparent piece of paper or deerskin over a drawing
and pricking along the contours that showed through.
The pricked tracing sheet was then placed over a blank
paper, and the artist tapped a mesh bag full of charcoal
or chalk powder over its holes to transmit a trail of dots
to the sheet below. This process left three types of arti-
fact: the initial drawing now bearing indentations from
the pricking of the superimposed khāka; the khāka or a
semitransparent sheet full of holes, darkened by charcoal
powder; and a sheet with tiny charcoal dots sometimes
subsequently connected by lines.
The khākas that relate to the Rāgamālā pages in
the Laud Rāgamālā Album (henceforth the Rāgamālā
khākas) do not exactly follow from either of these pro-
cesses. Their compositions were outlined in tiny, closely
spaced holes more delicately precise than is found on
any other khāka in the Bikaner Usta collection or on
 MOLLY EMMA AITKEN
Fig. 7. Gunakalı̄ Rāginı̄. Author’s reversed drawing connecting
˙
dots on printed photograph of Gunakalı̄ Rāginı̄ khāka. Original
reproduced in Figure 2.
any khāka this author has seen. No lines connect the
holes, but one side of each has been pounced in char-
coal. They are like the second type of pounce Roxburgh
describes except that the pages, while very thin, do not
seem ever to have been transparent. The Usta collection
includes several early tracing papers, and they are dis-
tinctly different from the paper used for the Rāgamālā
khākas. It is almost as if the artist had drawn in tiny
holes. (I am able to ‘‘draw’’ in holes, but find it an
awkward and tedious way to compose, so I doubt it
was the artist’s method.) The Usta Rāgamālā khākas
are not exceptions: a number of early khākas in the
Usta collection are of holes without lines. No related
drawing is known for any of these khākas to suggest
they were made from drawings pricked through to the
paper beneath. Only Bikaner khākas of later types of
subject matter and in later styles mix lines with holes,
and then consistently, as if a change in practice had
transpired. Precisely how these khākas were made and
why remains elusive. Though khākas make multiples
possible, and were used at other courts such as Bundi
to recycle compositions, Bikaner’s artists do not seem
to have relied on existing khākas to repeat composi-
tions. At Bikaner, khākas may have been produced for
 Sociability of Subimperial Painting 31
Fig. 8. Gunakalı̄ Rāginı̄. Attributed to Fazl, workshop of Abdul
Rahim, early˙ 17th c. Opaque watercolor and gold on paper
(wasli), page 38  24.6 cm. Bodleian Library, Oxford, MS. Laud
Or. 149 fol. 8a.
just one set of paintings (in this case, the paintings in
the Laud Rāgamālā Album). It is possible that khākas
were included in the production process partly to record
compositions. Once a finished painting left the work-
shop, painters were unlikely to see it again. Thus, sketches,
drawings, and khākas, made in the process of developing
a finished painting, were probably treasured as invaluable
documents of workshop production.
The three Usta khākas are in fragile condition, with
their edges flaked away. Each is a nearly exact model
for its corresponding page in the Laud Album, except
that two contain significant additional details. In the
Gunakalı̄ Rāginı̄, these include a panel door, which
˙ in the pavilion; a wall with small niches, which
closes
extends past the heroine’s pavilion, filling the back left
quadrant of the page; and an awning, which shades
the space where the heroine sits (Figs. 7, 8). The flask
32 ARCHIVES OF ASIAN ART
Fig. 9. Vasanta Rāginı̄. Author’s reversed drawing connecting
dots on printed photograph of Vasanta Rāginı̄ khāka. Original
reproduced in Figure 3.
behind her was originally a ewer without a handle, and
two shallow bowls initially rested to either side of it.15
The khāka for the Hindola Rāga is nearly identical to
its counterpart in the ˙album
˙ (Figs. 5, 6). However the
Vasanta Rāginı̄ khāka contains several important details
left out of the final image, such as two trees framing the
dancers, a pool of lotuses at their feet, rain streaming
down from above, and a blossoming mango branch in
Krishna’s upturned hand (Figs. 9, 10).
Holes may seem to offer little for the connoisseur’s
intuition to grasp, but the high quality of the paper
used for the khākas, the rare delicacy of their workman-
ship, the fashions worn by the figures, and the style of
the lines the holes trace firmly associate them with
early-seventeenth-century paintings, some of which, like
the Berlin Rāgamālā discussed below, are dated in reli-
able colophons. Therefore, I feel as confident about
assigning these khākas an early-seventeenth-century date
as I would about dating paintings from this era on the
basis of style.
Several details suggest the Laud Album paintings
were finished by an artist other than the master who
produced the khākas. First, the disparities in quality
and detail between the khākas and the paintings indi-
cate the paintings were done by a painter who was not
Fig. 10. Vasanta Rāginı̄. Attributed to Fazl, workshop of Abdul
Rahim, early 17th c. Opaque watercolor and gold on paper
(wasli), page 38  24.6 cm. Bodleian Library, Oxford, MS. Laud
Or. 149 fol. 66b.
committed to the khākas’ original ambitions, and who
may have misunderstood some of their details. One can
imagine, for example, how a second artist looking at the
Vasanta Rāginı̄ khāka might have left out the long
bumpy object in Krishna’s hand (a budding mango
branch), perhaps because he did not know what it
was. Meanwhile, the faces in the khākas seem less idio-
syncratic than those in the paintings: they are not as
squared and have less prominent eyes and chins. Finally,
the painter has given the hero of his Hindola Rāga
˙˙
a moustache and a chakdār jāmā (four-pointed robe)
absent in the corresponding khāka. It was not un-
common to alter a transferred composition in the pro-
cess of working it up into a painting, yet a number of
these changes read more like misreading or redirect-
ing than strategic simplification. None is proof that the
khākas and the paintings are by two different artists,
but further evidence will support the two-artist theory.
 MOLLY EMMA AITKEN
If two different artists produced the khākas and the
paintings, how are we to infer which one preceded the
other? Within the space of about a decade, might other
khākas have been produced for or from the Laud Album
compositions, forming the basis for paintings from which
these khākas were produced, with these khākas then
being used, in turn, for a now-lost manuscript? Such is
a more complicated and to my mind less likely scenario,
and it would still link Abdul Rahim’s workshop to
Bikaner, if more circuitously. In any case, Abdul Rahim
and the Bikaner royal family turn out to be connected in
too many other ways to dismiss.
b. Scholarship
Until a decade ago, the origins of the Laud Album
were unknown. Karl Khandalavala argued it was pro-
duced in the Deccan, Hermann Goetz placed it at
Amber, and several scholars have described it as ‘‘pro-
vincial Mughal’’ or ‘‘subimperial.’’16 Most recently, John
Seyller’s arguments for attributing the manuscript to the
workshop of the Khānkhānān Abdul Rahim (1556–
1626) seemed to lay the question to rest. Seyller located
a painter’s inscription in the Laud Album at the bottom
of a picture of entertainers, which reads ‘‘‘amal-i Kala
Pahara’’: work of Kala Pahari. Paintings in the same
style in the Khānkhānān’s illustrated Rāmāyana also
˙
bear inscriptions to Kala Pahara: the artist is certainly
the same. Seyller spots other clues to the manuscript’s
provenance. The Laud Album borders, for instance,
resemble borders produced in Abdul Rahim’s work-
shop.17
On the basis of style, Seyller attributes all but one of
the Rāgamālā paintings to Abdul Rahim’s artist Fazl,
whose name appears on many pages of the Khānkhānān’s
manuscripts, particularly of his Rāmāyana and Razm-
nāma. Seyller describes the ‘‘dark-skinned ˙ male’’ with
the ‘‘strong brow and nose, dark hair and sideburns, and
flaring mustache’’ as ‘‘characteristic of Fazl’s figures.’’18
Also typical of Fazl’s hand, according to Seyller, are his
rocks, with their ‘‘concentric rings of wash and line’’
and the ‘‘unusual spade-shaped top and striped trunk
of the palm tree in the upper right’’ of the Laud Album
Nāta Rāginı̄ page.19
˙ The attribution to Fazl is persuasive. Stylistically,
paintings bearing Fazl’s name in the Freer Rāmāyana
are not a close match, but the figure types in Fazl’s later˙
Razmnāma paintings are very similar, and the treatment
of foliage and clothing is, in some cases, identical. A dis-
tinctive turban, its folds heavily outlined, recurs in both
the Laud Album and in Fazl’s Razmnāma pages, as does
a three-pointed gold crown surmounted by disks. Fazl’s
 Sociability of Subimperial Painting 33
quick, almost scratchy shading of folds, like sheaths of a
springy grass, and hands that seem constructed from
cones of stiff paper appear throughout the Laud Album
Rāgamālā pages. Fazl was not an elegant painter, and
his energetic awkwardnesses stand out in Abdul Rahim’s
manuscripts. His moustaches are like steel brushes. He
often employs double lines around eyes, rendering them
heavy, and the outline of his sharp-tipped noses bends
back into a nostril like the head of an old fashioned
pin, all traits found in the Laud Album. Sita lying at
Lakshmana’s feet on the ground of one Razmnāma
page ascribed to Fazl wears the dress of the Laud Album
Rāgamālā heroines: their amulet-strung armbands, gold
beads, and bowed anklets as well as lehaṅgas (skirts)
spilling at the front with a white odhnı̄ (or daṁriyā, as
˙
Abul Fazl called the long scarf), striped ˙
with alternating
scalloped and straight lines and with delicate red criss-
crossed bands.20 That Fazl’s Razmnāma pages resemble
the Laud Album Rāgamālā paintings far more than his
Rāmāyana pages suggests the Rāgamālā paintings were
˙
made closer to 1616, when the Razmnāma was pro-
duced, than 1605, when a dated page indicates Abdul
Rahim’s Rāmāyana was completed.21
˙
Yet there are also subtle differences between the Laud
Album pages and Fazl’s ascribed work. Each of the Laud
Album Rāgamālā heroines has a delicate arch of darker
paint curling over her belly button, and a shaded line
rolls over the chins of the Laud heroes and heroines.
The Laud Album chins are fuller and rounder, eyes
tend to be larger, faces longer, and outlines heavier,
though the differences are subtle. The stylizations are
also possibly more consistent in the Laud Album pages
than in Fazl’s other work: is it possible that Fazl was
adjusting and unifying his style for this project? This is
a question to which we shall return shortly, but the
visual evidence overwhelmingly supports Seyller’s attri-
bution of the Laud Album Rāgamālā pages to Fazl.
c. Abdul Rahim’s and Raja Rai Singh’s Painters
If the painted Rāgamālā pages are a product of
Abdul Rahim’s workshop, what are we to make of find-
ing khākas with compositions that match them in what
was recently the Bikaner Usta family collection?
There is abundant evidence that Abdul Rahim knew
Raja Rai Singh, the ruler of Bikaner from 1541 to 1612.
In 1592, Akbar sent Raja Rai Singh to assist Abdul Rahim
in Thatta (Sind), and in 1593, the two men fought
together under Prince Murad in the Deccan. In 1586
and then again from 1604 to 1611, Raja Rai Singh
served as the sūbahdār (governor) of Burhanpur, one of
Abdul Rahim’s ˙ principal residences, where later, in
34 ARCHIVES OF ASIAN ART
1614, the latter built a garden and mansion filled with
murals.22 Seyller has noted an inscription on one of
Abdul Rahim’s paintings stating it was made in Burhanpur,
so the Mughal commander seems to have patronized
painting there as well.23 At the very least, the two noble-
men were living in Burhanpur simultaneously from
1604 until 1607, when Abdul Rahim is said to have
briefly left Burhanpur to pay his respects to Emperor
Jahangir, and probably for several years afterwards.24
A fair amount is known about Abdul Rahim’s
painters. Seyller discusses those named in the pages
of the nobleman’s illustrated manuscripts, including
Fazl, Qasim, Govardhana, Syama Sundara, Mohana,
and Ghulam Ali. Others are noted in the 1615 Ma‘āsı̄r-
iRahı̄mı̄: Mawlana Ibrahim Naqqash, a painter, callig- ˙
˙
rapher, illuminator, and poet as well as the supervisor of
Abdul Rahim’s library; Mawlana Mushfiq; Madhava,
a Hindu; the Rajput princes Nadim and Fahim from
Sirohi; and Bihbud. The Ma‘āsı̄r-iRahı̄mı̄ describes Abdul
Rahim’s close supervision of˙ these˙ artists, and names
several as wonders of their age, though this was a
generic rhetorical statement. Among the workshop’s pro-
ductions are the aforementioned dispersed Razmnāma
and a Rāmāyana now in the Freer Gallery of Art.25 In
the style now ˙broadly called ‘‘subimperial,’’ the illus-
trations in these manuscripts resemble paintings from
Akbar’s court but are less polished and would have
been somewhat outmoded.
We know less about Raja Rai Singh’s painters.
According to the Ustas’ living descendants, the family
hailed from Herat and settled in Multan in the early
sixteenth century. At least two branches of the family
relate that Raja Rai Singh brought Usta artisans from
Multan after having served as governor of Lahore.
According to family lore, Raja Rai Singh invited them
to help build and adorn his Junagadh Fort.26
The Usta family genealogy, which Davis has pub-
lished, names two artists whom scholars know to have
worked for the Bikaner royal family in the late sixteenth
and early seventeenth centuries: Shah Muhammad and his
nephew or son Nur Muhammad.27 (The family genealogy
that Davis published relates them as uncle and nephew,
but two early-seventeenth-century inscriptions identify
Nur Muhammad as Shah Muhammad’s son.) Shah
Muhammad’s work is unknown, but a portrait of him,
labeled ‘‘Bara [the Elder] Shah Muhammad ji,’’ formerly
in the Khajanchi collection, may have been made in his
lifetime.28 The drawing pictures him as an old man with
a long mullah-like beard and the slightly grumpy ex-
pression of a venerated elder. He holds a gaz (measuring
stick) in one hand, signaling he was the gazadār, or
head of the workshop, and his jāmā and katār (dagger)
˙
make a gentleman of him.29 Dates associated with Nur
Muhammad suggest Shah Muhammad was a working
adult in the late sixteenth century. If this Shah Muham-
mad is, indeed, the same artist who contributed a page
to the 1585 Tı̄mūrnāma, then he would have been at
least twenty in 1585, making him about seventy-five to
eighty years old in 1640, and the drawing could date to
around that time.30
Most of the Usta collection is in a range of related
Bikaner idioms. However, a number of the earliest works
look Mughal, suggesting that the Bikaner workshop
originated with Mughal-trained painters. For example,
an unpublished Mughal-style painting with a Persian
inflection, also from the Usta collection, is in the style
of works from Shah Muhammad’s period. Picturing a
prince with attendants, its figures are delicately limned
and turn in Persianate, three-quarter view. Two pairs
of cypress trees behind the palace and a pair of blue-
limned hares on the back of the ı̄wān (vaulted hall)
directly quote a well-known painting by the Persian
painter Farrukh Beg, possibly made when he was work-
ing in Kabul for Akbar’s half brother Muhammad
Hakim.31 Might Shah Muhammad or one of his cousins
have worked in Kabul as well?32
Akbar-era paintings in the Bikaner palace collection
probably came into royal hands under Raja Rai Singh,
but it would have been the Ustas who brought their
Mughal-style drawings to Bikaner.33 One such drawing
is of an angel, seated on a rock; another is a fragment of
boats floating on the water; a third pictures two wise
men conferring outside a cave.34 A fragmentary khāka,
apparently for the top portion of a vertical composi-
tion, delineates in tiny holes a Mughal-style landscape
of mountains, trees, and distant towns and temples.
More is known about Nur Muhammad. A lengthy
Persian inscription on a portrait of a Rajput nobleman
bearing the Bikaner palace stamp identifies Nur Muham-
mad as its artist, dates the painting to 1606, and names
the subject ‘‘Rao Bhoj Rathor’’ (Fig. 11).35 It further
states that the painting was made for Raja Rai Singh’s
son Prince (Kunwar) Surat Singh and that it was pro-
duced in Bikaner. Joachim Bautze has recently deter-
mined that, though the inscription calls him a Rathor,
the man pictured was Rao Bhoj Singh Hara of Bundi
(r. 1585–1607), because he is identified as such on
another version of Nur Muhammad’s portrait, which
also bears a Bikaner palace stamp. The distinctive face
recurs in a couple of Bundi paintings.36 Bhoj Singh is
framed within a cusped arch richly decorated with Per-
sianate arabesques. Eschewing idealism, Nur Muham-
mad pictured Bhoj Singh with a hawk’s nose, sharp
chin, long face, furrowed jaw, and authoritative frown.
 MOLLY EMMA AITKEN
Fig. 11. Portrait of Rao Bhoj Singh of Bundi. Inscribed Nur
Muhammad, dated 1606. Opaque watercolor and gold on
paper (wasli), page 26.4  18 cm, Gursharan and Elvira Sidhu
Collection.
The pattern of scallops along the hem of the ruler’s robe
and a certain simplicity of outline place the painting
more in what scholars call the ‘‘subimperial’’ than the
fully imperial mode.
 Sociability of Subimperial Painting 35
Fig. 12. Portrait of Kunwar Surat (Suraj or Sur) Singh. Bikaner,
ca. 1611–1613. Opaque watercolor and gold on paper (wasli),
20.5  13.4 cm. Catherine and Ralph Benkaim Collection.
An inscription along the bottom of a battle scene in
the Goenka collection also names Nur Muhammad, and
mentions Prince Surat Singh and Bikaner.37 The colors
are Mughal, the patterns Persianate, the liveliness Akbari,
but the craftsmanship is not imperial. Evidently, Prince
Surat Singh’s artist Nur Muhammad was producing
paintings in a somewhat unpolished variant on the late-
sixteenth-century Mughal style.38
Catherine Glynn has drawn my attention to at least
one other artist working in a Mughal-derived style for
the Bikaner royal family in this early period.39 In a
painting that bears a Bikaner palace stamp on its verso,
the artist produced a skillfully rendered, almost Mughal-
style portrait of Kunwar Surat Singh, whom its inscription
36 ARCHIVES OF ASIAN ART
Fig. 13. Yashoda Scolds Krishna, from a dispersed Bhāgavata-
purāna. Bikaner, early 17th c. Opaque watercolor and gold on
paper˙ (wasli), 17.2  24.6 cm. Art Institute of Chicago,
2007.384.
identifies by his nickname ‘‘Sur’’ (Fig. 12).40 The indi-
viduation and shading are Mughal, but the eye, though
delicately limned, is the idealized Rajput lotus, a perfect
petal turned out to the side. It is not Nur Muhammad’s
work.
Meanwhile, paintings illustrating Hindu courtly
themes and drawing on ‘‘pre-Mughal’’ painting conven-
tions were almost certainly also produced at Bikaner.
Most scholars assume an early-seventeenth-century illus-
trated Bhāgavatapurāna (e.g., Figs. 13, 19, 21, 23) to be
˙
Bikaneri, both because it bears Bikaner palace stamps,
and because it is a plausible stylistic precursor to later
Bikaner painting.41 Gentle pinks, yellows, and greens,
together with a Mughal regularity of figural and facial
proportions relate to the Mughal idiom Nur Muham-
mad was practicing, but hotter colors, the consistent
use of profile, and ‘‘pre-Mughal’’ conventions like the
horizontal format, the use of red frames, and the arched,
wavy, white lines of sky derive from a different stylistic
mode.
As yet, there is no good term for this mode. ‘‘Pre-
Mughal’’ suggests archaism, but these conventions re-
mained current at the Rajput courts well into the nine-
teenth century; ‘‘Indic’’ sets up ‘‘Mughal,’’ in contrast,
as foreign, which it was not; and ‘‘Rajput’’ would be
reductive, because Rajput patrons patronized this and
Mughal stylistic modes, often in combination. In addi-
tion, imperial Mughal paintings also sometimes dipped
into this mode, a strategy it is difficult to discuss if the
conventions are labeled ‘‘Rajput.’’ For now, I propose
to use the term ‘‘mārga,’’ a Sanskrit word that denotes
‘‘universal’’ as opposed to ‘‘local’’ traditions to describe
pictorial elements that were widely associated with pre-
Mughal painting, that did not derive from the Islamicate
world, and that were typically associated with Hindu
religious and court subject matter, particularly with tales
of lovers. These elements included compartmentaliza-
tion of frequently off-center compositions; horizontal
pages; areas that were strategically left empty and often
framed or semi-framed; an almost exclusive use of pro-
file; graphically simplified skies, comprising wavy lines
and washes; a preference for bold, warm, unmodulated
colors; and internally framed areas of solid, intense
red. This cluster of long-persisting, transregional, ‘‘pre-
Mughal’’ pictorial strategies continued to recur in a
wide range of ‘‘desi’’ or local styles well into the nine-
teenth century, though only a few of these conventions
typically sufficed in a painting to allude to the ‘‘mārga’’
tradition. To the extent that these conventions tran-
scended distinctions among ‘‘desi’’ styles (for example,
the Bundi or Mewar style), they seem to fit the defini-
tion of mārga as it was used in literature. Furthermore,
because the word mārga typically referred to Indian
cosmopolitan literature, it associates these pictorial con-
ventions with the texts they were developed to illustrate.
Finally, mārga implies consciousness of the status these
conventions held in a wider pictorial universe that en-
compassed Persian, European, and the evolving Mughal
traditions.42
At least two types of painting would then have been
produced at Bikaner in the early 1600s: illustrations using
mārga conventions, and historical scenes and portraits
in a Mughal-looking idiom. How do the Rāgamālā
khākas relate to these two modes of painting? As sug-
gested earlier, the khākas do not seem to be in Fazl’s
style. They do, however, combine mārga conventions,
like the consistent use of profile, with Mughal propor-
tions and delicacy. They could well have been made by
Nur Muhammad (Fig. 11), though the artist of the Surat
Singh portrait (Fig. 12) is as good a candidate, because
the khākas, though clearly in an early Mughal-related
idiom, lack stylistic idiosyncrasies on which to hang an
attribution to an individual master. The khākas also
share a number of qualities with the illustrated Bhāga-
vatapurāna (Fig. 13). In both, figures tend to float, and
˙
architectural settings appear to one side of the page,
extending beyond the frame. These settings typically
feature slender columns and flat roofs around a box-
like space. Even without their provenance in the Usta
collection, on stylistic grounds, Bikaner would have
been a plausible place of origin for the khākas.
 MOLLY EMMA AITKEN
What helps most in determining the relationship be-
tween the khākas and the Laud Album Rāgamālā paint-
ings, however, is subject matter: the Rāgamālā. The
iconography of the Laud Album Rāgamālā follows
what Klaus Ebeling has termed the ‘‘Rajasthani Tra-
dition.’’ It recurs in many major Rajput Rāgamālās of
the time, including the Chunar, Chawand, and Manley
Rāgamālās.43 To date, no imperial Mughal Rāgamālā
paintings from this period are known. In the following
pages, the Rāgamālā khākas and additional works in
the Usta family collection will be examined to suggest
that the Bikaner royal family was a major source of
Rāgamālās, and that a number of early-seventeenth-
century Rāgamālās, possibly including the Manley Rā-
gamālā, were produced for Raja Rai Singh or his son
Kunwar Surat Singh. The compositions in the khākas
closely resemble the compositions in these Rāgamālās,
so that the khākas fit in with the productions of the
Bikaner workshop. It makes sense, therefore, that the
compositions originated in Bikaner rather than in Abdul
Rahim’s workshop, even if Abdul Rahim’s painter pro-
duced the final paintings. The Chunar Rāgamālā will
also enter an emerging picture of fellow noblemen,
joined by family and political allegiances, sharing paint-
ings and iconography in a social network of painting
and music enthusiasts. In this network, Raja Rai Singh
would have been an obvious source of Rāgamālā com-
positions for Abdul Rahim.
d. Rāgamālā Painting
Between 1591 and about 1615, Rāgamālās became
a favorite subject for illustration among Rajput patrons.
The term rāga, which means ‘‘color’’ or ‘‘passion,’’ de-
notes a musical mode.44 A relationship between musical
modes and aesthetic moods dates back to the fifth-
century Nātyaśāstra, though that text did not use the
term. Rāgas˙ seem to have originated late in the first
millennium of the Common Era, and the rāga-rāginı̄
system developed between the thirteenth and sixteenth
centuries. This system organized musical modes into six
rāgas, each with wives called rāginı̄s, and, over time,
came sometimes to include eight or nine sons or rāgapu-
tras, themselves sometimes married. By the 1400s, rāgas
were being associated with verses about heroes and
heroines and with times of the day and seasons. The
musicologist Katherine Butler Schofield writes:
Gradually the North Indian Rāgas collected a host
of aesthetic properties by which they were
differentiated, including the times and seasons of
their performance, associations with deities and
moods, purported magical properties, and so on.
 Sociability of Subimperial Painting 37
The most intriguing manifestation of this procedure
was the Rāgamālā, iconographical depictions of the
Rāgas and Rāginı̄s as heroes, heroines, and deities
in verse and painting from the fourteenth century
onwards—although there is no known connection
between the iconographical and musical aspects of
the Rāgas.45
Musicologists speculate that by 1600, when Rāga-
mālās began frequently to be illustrated, they were
more about the idea of knowing music than about the
practice of music. That is, musicians were probably not
referring to Rāgamālā verses and illustrations when they
performed, and the Rāgamālā’s poetic and pictorial
dimensions may have been valued, instead, primarily as
a form of elite knowledge, a sign of the courtier’s taste
for music, and an attribute of the gentleman patron.46
Before the late fifteenth century, it seems that Rāga-
mālās were rarely illustrated. The iconography in one of
the only fifteenth-century examples, a Jain Rāgamālā
and the iconography of the Deccani Rāgamālā tradition,
which arose in the later 1500s, was also distinct from
that which would soon flourish at the Rajput courts in
Rajasthan, though the fact of the Deccan’s illustrated
Rāgamālās probably inspired Rajput patrons.47 Several
illustrated series, which are thought to have been pro-
duced in the Rajasthan region, date what would become
the standard Rajasthani iconography to the early to
mid-sixteenth century. For example, a Bhairavı̄ Rāginı̄
from that time, purportedly acquired in Pratapgarh
(Mewar), plays her mañjı̄ra (hand cymbals) in front of
an enshrined liṅga in a composition that would denote
Bhairavı̄ Rāginı̄ in the region for centuries to come.
Two more illustrated Rāgamālās, in a roughly mid-
sixteenth-century style, one published by Norman Brown
in 1948, the other, in the Bharat Kala Bhavan in Vara-
nasi, contain much of what would become Rajasthan’s
Rāgamālā iconography.48 This iconography therefore
decidedly predated the Mughals.
By the 1590s, Mughal painting seems to have begun
inspiring Rajput patrons to retain their own painters,
and one of the first types of illustrated series that Rajput
patrons then began to commission was the illustrated
Rāgamālā. The Chunar, Chawand, Manley, and Laud
Album Rāgamālās are the best known and most exten-
sively intact of these early Rāgamālās, but many other
Rāgamālā pages in similar styles attest to the Rāgamālā’s
efflorescence between about 1590 and 1620. The script
on these paintings, when it is to be found, is usually De-
vanāgarı̄, implying Rajput patronage.49
Most scholars of Indian painting now believe some
of these circa-1600 Rāgamālā pages were produced at
38 ARCHIVES OF ASIAN ART
Fig. 14. Deśākh Rāginı̄. Bikaner, early 17th c. Opaque
watercolor on paper (wasli), approx. 19.5  14.3 cm. Private
collection, USA.
Bikaner. A Deśākh Rāginı̄ page, one of the few paint-
ings in the Usta family collection, supports the case
for this supposition (Fig. 14). It pictures three acrobats
against a mauve background, which washes into blue
toward the top of the page and shifts to green toward
the bottom. The borders are uncolored, and a dhyāna
verse is written above the painting in an elegant, profes-
sional, black Devanāgarı̄ script with the final words,
identifying the rāginı̄s, in red. The page shares the same
borders, black with red script, style, size, and discolored
condition as eight dispersed pages of a known Rāga-
mālā series.50 The palette of the Bharat Kala Bhavan’s
Meghamalār page from this series is almost identical to
that of the Usta Deśākh Rāginı̄ page, with its wash of
mauve resting on a swath of green ground.
These pages from what I will call for convenience
here the ‘‘Usta Rāgamālā’’ follow the template employed
by the well-known dispersed ‘‘Berlin Rāgamālā,’’ so
called because four of its pages are in the Museum für
Asiatische Kunst, Berlin (Fig. 15).51 With a colophon
Fig. 15. Deśvārı̄ Rāginı̄, page from the Berlin Rāgamālā.
Bikaner, 1605–1606. Ink and opaque watercolor on paper
(wasli), 16.5  11.8 cm. Metropolitan Museum of Art,
1987.417.2.
dating it to 1605 to 1606, the Berlin Rāgamālā series
also has plain, pale borders and professional, neatly cal-
ligraphed dhyānas like the Usta Rāgamālā pages, except
that the Usta Rāgamālā dhyānas end in red letters. The
backgrounds of the Berlin series are similarly washed
with color, the palette is soft with the same mauves,
lavenders, watery blues, and celadon greens, and the
style is in the same subimperial vein, though the two
illustrated series are not by the same artist, and the Berlin
Rāgamālā is more delicately executed. Quite possibly,
the Berlin Rāgamālā was painted a generation earlier
than the Usta Rāgamālā, but more likely the Usta Rāga-
mālā was a less important series and was therefore pro-
duced more quickly. Similar conventions appear in both
series, from the curtains that part and swag to either
side in the lovers’ pavilions to the architectural styles,
textile patterns, and recurring cranes. The composition
and palette of the Berlin Todi Rāginı̄ and Usta Kāmoda
˙
 MOLLY EMMA AITKEN
Fig. 16. Kāmoda Rāginı̄, from the Usta Rāgamālā. Attributed
here to Bikaner, early 17th c. Opaque watercolor and gold on
paper (wasli), image 16.4  12.2 cm. Brooklyn Museum of Art,
Anonymous Gift, 79.187.1.
Rāginı̄ are particularly close: the two images share simi-
lar cranes, blue skies, and red backgrounds, and in both
the heroine holds a similar pose, with their heads turned
to the left and away from the direction of their feet
(Figs. 16, 17).52
Several scholars have noted the relationship between
these Rāgamālās and the Bikaner Bhāgavatapurāna
˙ appears on the hero’s jāmā in the Berlin Rāgamālā and
(Figs. 13; 14–17). Pratapaditya Pal, for example, sug-
gested decades ago that the Berlin Rāgamālā might be
from Bikaner when, referring to the red square behind
Krishna in that series’s Meghamalār, he noted that it
‘‘employs a stylistic cliché that seems to stem directly
from the earlier Bikaner painting [i.e., the Bhāgava-
tapurāna].’’53 Many other comparisons can be made:
˙
the women in the Berlin Rāgamālā and in several of
the Bikaner Bhāgavatapurāna pages, for example, have
˙ series, which embraces Mughal celadons and lavenders
similar facial types, with low brows, minnow eyes,
 Sociability of Subimperial Painting 39
Fig. 17. Todi Rāginı̄, from the Berlin Rāgamālā. Attributed
˙ manuscript dated 1605. Opaque watercolor and
to Bikaner,
gold on paper (wasli), Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu
Sangrahalaya.
and sometimes downturned mouths. All three illustrated
series employ a similar range of decorative motifs on a
square pavilion typically shifted to one side of the page.
All feature quarter lotuses on architectural brackets (dis-
creetly visible in Fig. 15), while the Berlin Rāgamālā and
Bhāgavatapurāna share swaths of hexagons, such as
˙
those that sheathe the domes in the Berlin Vaṅgāla
Rāginı̄ and the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s Bhāga-
vatapurāna illustration of Krishna and Satyabhama’s
wedding.˙54 Clothing details match: a trefoil pattern
on Krishna’s dhoti in a Bhāgavatapurāna page from the
Goenka collection;55 an identical pattern ˙ appears on the
breasts of women’s cholı̄s (blouses) in both series (see
the pattern on the heroine’s cholı̄ in Figure 15, for exam-
ple);56 while the odhnı̄s flowing down from the women’s
waists in the Usta˙ Rāgamālā and the Bikaner Bhāgava-
tapurāna, are gathered at horizontal intervals in the
manner˙ visible in Figure 13. The palette of all three
40 ARCHIVES OF ASIAN ART

Fig. 18. Madhumadhavi Rāgin̄, from the Manley Rāgamālā,

c. 1610. Opaque watercolor on paper (wasli). British Museum,
1973,0917,0.6.

and ‘‘pre-Mughal’’ oranges and reds, is strikingly alike.

Thus, the discovery of the Deśākh page (Fig. 14) in the
Usta family collection joins the Bikaner palace stamp
on the Bhāgavatapurāna to strengthen the attribution
of the Berlin and Usta ˙Rāgamālās and this Bhāgavata-
purāna to Bikaner artists.
˙ Rāgamālā khākas (Figs. 1–3) also buttress the
The
attribution to Bikaner. The poses and arrangement of
Fig. 19. Detail of the Wedding of Satyabhama and Krishna,
the figures in the Usta Vasanta Rāginı̄ khāka (and there-
from a dispersed Bhāgavatapurāna. Bikaner, early 17th c.
fore also in the Laud Album Rāgamālā pages) are almost ˙
Opaque watercolor on paper (wasli), 21.3  29.7 cm.
identical to those employed in the Usta Rāgamālā Philadelphia Museum of Art, 125th Anniversary Acquisition.
Vasanta Rāginı̄, except that the figure of Krishna is Alvin O. Bellak Collection. 2004-149-17.
flipped and holds a vı̄nā and vessel instead of a mango
branch.57 The cranes ˙in the Hindola Rāga khāka (and
the corresponding Laud Album ˙Rāgamālā
˙ page) feature Berlin and Usta Rāgamālās as well as of the Bikaner
in the Berlin and Usta Rāgamālās, and the architectural Bhāgavatapurāna.
˙
That Rāgamālās were initially a Rajput specialty; that
setting in the Usta khāka of Gunakalı̄ Rāginı̄—a square
pavilion off to one side—is a ˙standard feature of the the Mughal emperors, princes, and Muslim mansabdārs
˙
 MOLLY EMMA AITKEN
were not, to our knowledge, producing illustrated Rāga-
mālās this early; that Rāgamālās seem to have been a
Bikaner specialty by 1605 to 1606 when the Berlin
Rāgamālā was produced (almost certainly before the
Laud Album was made); and that the Laud Album com-
positions relate to these Bikaner Rāgamālās, underscore
the likelihood that the Usta khākas were, indeed, the
source for the Laud Album Rāgamālā paintings.
At the risk of digression, one further Rāgamālā, the
Manley Rāgamālā in the British Museum (Fig. 18), begs
to be discussed here, because scholars have often noted
its affinities with the Laud Album Rāgamālā pages.58 I
propose here that the Manley Rāgamālā was indeed
produced by Usta artists or by artists within their
milieu. Daniel Ehnbom wrote of the Berlin Rāgamālā
that it ‘‘is closely related in style to the famous Rāga-
mālā of the W. B. Manley Collection now in the British
Museum, London.’’59 The Berlin, Usta, and Manley
Rāgamālās all have the same plain borders and neatly
scripted dhyānas, and they share iconography, composi-
tions, palette, and similar figure and facial styles, though
they are not by the same artist. Like the Bikaner Bhā-
gavatapurāna, the Manley Rāgamālā favors fields of
˙
color washing one into the next, a palette rich with cela-
dons, yellows, mauves, and lavenders, and off-center,
square, flat-roofed pavilions with slender pillars and
brown chajjās (eaves). It stands apart primarily in the
extensive elaboration of its settings and in its rejection
of the brilliant ‘‘pre-Mughal’’ reds, which are so promi-
nent in the other Bikaner series discussed here. (Given
the overlapping social spheres of Abdul Rahim’s and
Raja Rai Singh’s worlds, one should consider, however,
whether the manuscript might have been commissioned
for a non-Rajput audience who would have shied away
from the artificiality of the mārga red. After all, the
nasta‘liq inscriptions suggest that the Manley Rāgamālā
eventually found its way to an owner who preferred the
nasta‘liq to the Devanāgarı̄ script.)
A number of identical decorative details recur in
both the Manley Rāgamālā and the Bikaner Bhāgavata-
purāna. In the Bhāgavatapurāna, for example, continu-
˙
ous waves run along the door˙ in a picture of Krishna’s
marrying Satyabhama, and a quarter lotus nestles within
the lavender bracket beside it (cf. lotuses in Figs. 18
and 19). These waves also wash along the base of the
pavilion in the Manley’s Mālava Rāginı̄, the top of the
brick wall in its Vairārı̄ and Rāmkarı̄ Rāginı̄s, and
above the gate in its Gunakarı̄. The quarter lotus in the
Bhāgavatapurāna and the ˙ Berlin Rāgamālā turns up in
˙
the bracket of the Manley’s Madhumādhavı̄ Rāginı̄
(Fig. 18). Also similar are the small gold vessels that
seem to float about the ground, and the alizarin vase
 Sociability of Subimperial Painting 41
silhouettes in white wall niches. A red bed, topped by a
diagonal yellow bolster, with sheets draped over the bed-
posts and along the sides exhibits a distinctive pattern of
swags in both the Manley Rāgamālā and the Bhāgava-
tapurāna (Figs. 20, 21). An odhnı̄ worn by women in
˙
both series falls in horizontal ˙ segments, each segment
gathered into minute folds (Figs. 13, 18, 19). The two
series also share plants: the same irises, for example,
and a manner of veining leaves that looks etched.60
This last is a device for foliage that can be traced back
to Mughal painting, but there is a striking correspon-
dence here between the quick, somewhat schematic ren-
dering of the etched lines in both series. Certain building
details are also identical: a beehive pattern of octagons,
for example, and fields of hexagons embedded with six-
pointed stars. A brown pediment that runs above the
chajjās in each series frames a Mughal-style repeating
arch motif and is topped by crenellations decorated
with crosses. Again, such elements stem from Mughal
art, but a certain tipsy informality in their rendering
makes them virtually identical in the Manley Rāgamālā
and the Bhāgavatapurāna, even if the former is a more
˙
precisely crafted manuscript. 61
In his detailed study of Rāgamālā painting, Klaus
Ebeling observed that the ‘‘majority of [Rāgamālā]
pages’’ of the Laud Album ‘‘are apparently not copied
but are visually so close to [the Manley Rāgamālā] in
their human poses, that one can conclude that the
maker of one set knew the other set, or that both sets
derived from one precursor.’’62 Indeed, the Laud Album
and Manley Rāgamālās have thirteen rāgas and rāginı̄s
in common. Eleven of these rāgas and rāginı̄s have the
same core iconography, while nine of them use almost
identical poses, though a few figures are reversed, and
no figure derives from a khāka used for both manu-
scripts. Ebeling points to Nata Rāginı̄ to illustrate the
uncanny resemblance between˙ pages of the Manley Rā-
gamālā and Laud Album Rāgamālās. The hero and his
horse could be, as Ebeling points out, free-hand copies
of each other. This likeness extends to the disposition
of the horse’s feet, the swag flying back from beneath
the horse’s chin, the bent arm of the hero, who clutches
his reins with his left hand, and the hero’s right arm,
which is raised, sword in hand, to strike down the
enemy before him. The slain figure below lies in the
same pose in both pictures, neck slashed, broken sword
before him. Such correspondences abound in the two
manuscripts’ other rāgas and rāginı̄s as well.
The Manley Rāgamālā is also a likely precursor for
later Bikaner Rāgamālās. A Gunakalı̄ Rāginı̄, ascribed
to the Bikaner master Ruknuddin, ˙ essentially recreates
the Manley’s Gunakalı̄ composition (there the inscrip-
˙
42 ARCHIVES OF ASIAN ART
Fig. 20. Detail of Malaśri Rāginı̄, from the Manley Rāgamālā.
Attributed here to Bikaner, early 17th c., British Museum,
1973,0917,0.18.
tion specifies Gunakarı̄), with a pavilion behind the
heroine, diagonal˙ bolster across the empty bed, wall
beyond and gate to the right.63 In addition, the Manley
Vangāla Rāginı̄ seems to be a source for a later seven-
˙
teenth-century Bikaner Vangāla Rāginı̄ at the Museum
of Fine Arts, Boston, and˙ an early-eighteenth-century
Bikaner version at the Chazen Museum of Art, Madison,
Wisconsin.64 An unusual detail in the Manley Rāgamālā,
which was not otherwise in circulation in Rajasthan,
resurfaces in a mid-seventeenth-century Rāgamālā whose
style has led scholars to associate it with Bikaner.65 It is
the image of the hero of the Manley Rāgamālā’s Kedār
Rāginı̄, dressed in a translucent white jāmā and yellow
paijāmah, who closes his eyes and bows his head before
a sage. He reappears as Kedār Rāginı̄, head bowed,
eyes closed, and in the same yellow clothes in a page
from the later manuscript now in the Museum Rietberg,
Zurich.66
If we accept that Bikaner patrons commissioned the
Manley Rāgamālā, then Bikaner begins to seem to have
been, not just a source, but one of the principal sources
for Rāgamālā paintings around 1600. However, the
issue of place must be problematized: in the following,
I suggest focusing on the association of ‘‘subimperial’’
paintings with spheres of production and reception rather
than on their attribution to fixed locations.
Fig. 21. Detail of Yashoda Scolding Krishna, from a dispersed
Bhāgavatapurāna. Bikaner, early 17th c. Opaque watercolor
˙
with gold on paper (wasli), 17.2  24.6 cm. The Art Institute of
Chicago, 2007.384.
e. Mobile Styles circa 1600
Abdul Rahim was fond of music, and Raja Rai
Singh would have been an obvious person from whom
to obtain Rāgamālā iconography.67 Exactly how the
Rāgamālā compositions were transferred, however, is
still obscure. Did Raja Rai Singh or his son Kunwar
Surat Singh offer pounces from their artists’ Rāgamālā
khākas to Abdul Rahim? If so, such a gift would have
been highly unusual. Rāgamālā images in north India
at this time were extensively interrelated, an issue to
which I shall return in a moment. However, no identical
pages of a rāga or rāginı̄ are known. Only at Bundi in
this early period were artists reusing ancestral khākas
(the Chunar khākas) to remake Rāgamālā compositions.
Bikaner’s artists did not; Bikaner Rāgamālās were always
variations on one another. At Bikaner, khākas seem to
have been important to the initial production of a work
of art and were probably kept as records of a composi-
tion after the final painting left the workshop, but they
were not, to my knowledge, employed to make multi-
ples. I am intrigued by fairly substantial indications
that the Bikaner artists and Abdul Rahim’s artists may
sometimes have worked together or in close proximity
to one another, which raises the possibility that the
khākas and the final Laud Album Rāgamālā paintings,
though produced by two different artists primarily
working for two different patrons, may not have been
produced in two different workshops.
 MOLLY EMMA AITKEN
Fig. 22. Detail showing Bhima from a Razmnāma page,
Krishna Pacifies Balarama. Attributed to Fazl, 1616–1617.
Opaque watercolor and gold on paper (wasli), 38  23 cm. The
Metropolitan Museum of Art, Rogers Fund, 55.121.32a.
In addition to iconography, Fazl’s Rāgamālā pages
in the Laud Album share a suggestive number of pic-
torial details with the Berlin and Usta Rāgamālā. The
same abstract washes of color fill their backgrounds,
for example, and a pattern of leaves, interspersed with
flowers and typically executed in lavender, runs along
horizontal elements of buildings in both the Berlin Rā-
gamālā and in Fazl’s Rāgamālā.
There are also affinities between Fazl’s Rāgamālā
paintings and the pages of the Bikaner Bhāgavata-
purāna. Paintings from both sets of illustrations feature
˙
a distinctive lemon yellow ambience and reduce back-
grounds to simple expanses of color. They favor square-
roofed white buildings with pink and lavender details,
brown chajjās, and pistachio green roofs. Facial types
are similar as well. Heads and features are propor-
tionally akin and eyes similarly minnow-like. Turbans,
often with alizarin folds, are sometimes virtually iden-
tical.68 Pink-purple stones sprouting green leaves, a
Mughal convention, are dispersed through both, like
amiable crabs, and in both, long green grasses, the
gesture of a single brushstroke, grow from the bases of
trees. What is, perhaps, most startling are the shaded
lines that loop over Fazl’s distinctly articulated belly
buttons: though nowhere to be found in Fazl’s other
paintings, they appear in the illustration of Krishna
with Putana in the Bikaner Bhāgavatapurāna.69 Fazl
has to have been looking at Rajput Rāgamālās ˙ to have
 Sociability of Subimperial Painting 43
Fig. 23. Page from a dispersed Bhāgavatapurāna. Bikaner,
˙
early 17th c. Opaque watercolor and gold on paper (wasli),
17  24.8 cm. Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gift of the Kronos
Collection, 1978.535.
arrived at his blue and yellow backgrounds, but perhaps
he was familiar with Bikaner painting generally. Bikaner’s
Rāgamālā painters may equally have known paintings
from Abdul Rahim’s workshop. A comparison of details
in one of Fazl’s Razmnāma pages and in a Bhāgavatapu-
rāna page finds many of the same affinities (Figs. 22, 23).
˙ Tracing motifs and conventions from one manuscript
or illustrated series to the next, a method on which I
rely heavily in this article, is tiring and unpleasurable
work for a reader to follow, but it is important to
acknowledge similarities for which our assumptions do
not encourage us to look. Bikaner’s and Abdul Rahim’s
painters—working for Rajput and Muslim mansabdārs—
seem unreconcilable, but the conditions of the ˙period do
not require them to have been so. Let me add that quite
a few related paintings, not discussed here, amplify
the impression of an overlap between the Bikaner royal
family’s and Abdul Rahim’s workshops: a Rambha-
Sukha Samvād page, for example, that has been asso-
˙ciated with˙ Bikaner because of its style, features the
same light, squiggling line running along the inside
perimeters of its rocks, which, as John Seyller has noted,
is characteristically found in Fazl’s Laud Album pages.70
How might such similarities have arisen? Artists like
Nur Muhammad traveled. Many of the conventions that
recur widely in subimperial paintings followed from
the dispersal of painters out of the imperial workshop,
particularly after Akbar’s death when Emperor Jahangir
44 ARCHIVES OF ASIAN ART
Fig. 24. Saindhavı̄ Rāginı̄. India, subimperial, c. 1600–1610.
Opaque watercolor and gold on paper (wasli), 29.7  22.1 cm.
Cleveland Museum of Art, Gift of Natesan Galleries, Ltd.,
London, 2001.112.
(r. 1605–1627) began winnowing his workshop down
to a comparatively small number of masters. Once dis-
persed, artists journeyed in search of patronage. The
inscription that names the ‘‘subimperial’’ master Ustad
Salivahana, who worked in a style related to Bikaner’s,
reads ‘‘Usta Salivahana,’’ which suggests he was a mem-
ber of the painter Nur Muhammad’s clan.71 Presumably
his style reflected both his family relationships and his
Mughal training. It is likely that such painters often did
not establish loyalty to one patron. Seyller describes a
situation of constant movement and exchange:
[T]he biographies in the Ma‘āsı̄r-iRahı̄mı̄
collectively describe a situation ˙
˙ in which an elite
group of Mughal patrons—including the imperial
family—shuttled poets and calligraphers back and
forth among themselves almost as routinely as the
valuables and manuscripts they regularly
exchanged.72
Might painters have been ‘‘shuttled’’ like poets and
calligraphers? In such a context, can we assume that
painters like Nur Muhammad were exclusively dedicated
to one patron, or that some of Abdul Rahim’s artists
might not have moonlighted elsewhere?
Scholars of Indian painting are accustomed to using
style to link paintings to artists, patrons, and places.
The mobility I describe here, which was endemic around
1600, made non-imperial paintings of this period often
virtually unplaceable, making it a frustrating period for
the connoisseur to handle. I doubt any scholar has felt
satisfied assigning the vague rubric ‘‘subimperial’’ to a
work of art. It might be argued, however, that patrons
encouraged similarities within the broad field of paint-
ing at the time to create cohesion across the broad ex-
panses of the empire.73 Certainly it is rare for paintings
of this period to include cues to specific locations. More
often, a Mughal celadon effaces place to offer, instead, a
non-specific Mughal ambience, such as one finds in the
portrait of Prince Surat Singh. The result was paintings
that made sense anywhere in the empire. Only later,
after artists like Nur Muhammad had shifted perma-
nently to places like Bikaner, Amber, and Bundi, did
their descendants begin to forge locally rooted idioms.
The connoisseur’s methods of close looking and
comparison are not useless if the scholar assumes one
basic fact: for a piece of visual information to appear in
two different paintings, the information has to have
traveled. Recurring motifs, conventions, palettes, tech-
niques, iconography, and compositions are the traces of
movement and contact. Mostly it is not possible to say
what these movements or contacts were, but acknowl-
edging dispersal can lead to useful new ways of thinking
about art of this era.
Take the example of a dispersed subimperial Rāga-
mālā series, which has been receiving recent attention
(Fig. 24).74 It favors the horizontality and compositional
logic of the Bikaner Bhāgavatapurāna, a Bikaner palette
keyed up a notch and shifted a ˙ degree toward the
visionary, Bikaner’s plain Rāgamālā borders with their
neat text, and Bikaner/Abdul Rahim figure and facial
types. The mix is overlaid with a layer of teeming orna-
ment, in which patterns, blue flowers, turning branches,
ripening fruit, lotuses, and swirling water buzz as on
a hot day in spring after a drenching rain. It both is
and is not like the manuscripts we have been examining.
It is tempting to call it Bikaneri, for here, again, is the
triangular roof and the ciqs (screens) of the Bikaner
Bhāgavatapurāna, the scrolling vine motif of the Berlin
Rāgamālā and ˙the Laud Album, and the architectural
framing so typical of contemporaneous Bikaner works
generally. However, the extravagance of this illustrated
series is more Deccani in character. Indeed, Robert
Skelton notes that the Sanskrit text it illustrates, Kshe-
makarna’s Rāgamālā treatise, became popular in the
Deccan.75
Rather than place this illustrated series, might we
associate it with a Raja Rai Singh–Abdul Rahim/Deccan
sphere of production?76 Its wild decorations and hot
colors read like a unique, excited confluence of mārga,
Bikaneri, Persian, Mughal, and Deccani painting: warm
Indic yellow and orange, Persianate turquoise, Deccani
skies, Mughal faces, and the cranes favored in Raja
Rai Singh’s and Abdul Rahim’s paintings. The Birla
 MOLLY EMMA AITKEN
Fig. 25. Vairārı̄ Rāginı̄, from the Laud Rāgamālā Album.
Attributed to Fazl, early 17th c. Opaque watercolor and gold on
paper, page 38  24.6 cm. Bodleian Library, Oxford, MS. Laud
Or. 149, fol. 40b.
Razmnāma, too, which has markedly similar colors,
stylistic mannerisms, and buzzingly verdant backgrounds,
probably belongs to the same or, at least, an overlap-
ping sphere of production. The Razmnāma also looks
like a return to mārga painting by way of the Mughal
imperium and the Deccan. In the world of the Mughal
mansabdārs, the Persian and Devanāgarı̄ texts on,
˙
respectively, the Birla Razmnāma and Khsemakarna
Rāgamālā need not indicate different realms of patron-
age, the Mughal versus the Rajput. Instead, these sets
of illustrations could have emerged from similar liminal
positions in between disparate pictorial centers. Abdul
Rahim was actively patronizing Hindu subject matter;
was, we know from the Laud Album, interested in
Rāgamālā painting; and is said to have read Sanskrit.
The Kshemakarna Rāgamālā could well have been pro-
duced for Abdul Rahim or someone like him by artists
working for both Muslim and Hindu patrons. Or it
and the Birla Razmnāma could have been produced by
 Sociability of Subimperial Painting 45
artists in the Deccan for a Hindu patron like Raja Rai
Singh, who, as a Mughal administrator, would have
been able to read Persian, as we know from the Persian
inscriptions on the Bikaner painter Nur Muhammad’s
works. Both patrons had family members who may
themselves have patronized paintings. Raja Rai Singh’s
son Dulip quite probably commissioned paintings when
he was in the Deccan, too.77 Wherever they were pro-
duced, these paintings are a mix, which may only make
sense if we look for conversations among patrons and
painters who were brought together, here and there, on
Mughal assignment. Rather than place such paintings,
perhaps we can, instead, work toward identifying them
with specifiable social spheres in the mobile society of
the Mughal empire’s mansabdārs.
˙
f. Friendship
Pictorial information traveled through circulating
paintings, painters, and patrons. A key challenge of
studying this era is determining which kinds of circulat-
ing we are seeing. I would like to broaden the ‘‘sphere’’
of circulation slightly, still focusing on Rāgamālās, more
precisely to contextualize the Raja Rai Singh–Abdul
Rahim connection.
Thus far the Rāgamālās I have examined have been
iconographically and stylistically linked. Rāgamālās pro-
duced around 1600 were almost all iconographically
linked, but not always so closely connected stylistically.
Even so, iconographic connections would have followed
from some sort of contact and mobility. For example,
the iconography, settings, figurations, and compositions
in the Chunar Rāgamālā (1591), the Chawand Rāgamālā
(1605), and the Manley Rāgamālā (ca. 1605–1615) are
alike. Their artists have to have had access to the same
visual information. The rocky hills in the backgrounds
of their Āsāvarı̄ Rāginı̄s are Persianate, a convention
that would have appeared in Rāgamālā painting during
the Mughal era.78 Given the rarity of Rāgamālās from
before 1591, Persianate rocks probably entered the
Rāgamālā repertoire around the time the Chunar Rāga-
mālā was made—indeed, possibly, through the Chunar
Rāgamālā. Some sharing here was recent, even rather
sudden.
Yet, despite their interconnections, the styles of these
three Rāgamālās are distinct: the Chunar Rāgamālā
is stylistically tied to Akbari painting of about 1570
to 1585; the Chawand Rāgamālā looks ‘‘pre-Mughal’’;
and the Manley Rāgamālā has an affinity with the tastes
of the early Jahangir era.79 There are several factors at
work here, including changing tastes, different work-
shops, and intentional expressions of cultural affiliation.
46 ARCHIVES OF ASIAN ART
The decidedly non-Mughal look of the Chawand Rāga-
mālā, for example, is frequently thought to denote the
Mewar dynasty’s preference for the idioms of their glory
days and/or their symbolic refusal to engage with Mughal
culture.80
The amount that is shared between the Chunar and
Manley Rāgamālās is particularly thought-provoking.
A pair of partridges roost in the Manley and Chunar
Āsāvarı̄s’ rocky settings. How did such repetitions come
about? The iconography in these illustrated Rāgamālās
is based on one text, which Ebeling calls Sanskrit Text
B, and which was the foundation of the Rajasthani Tra-
dition, but the visual correlations among these Rāga-
mālā series can only have resulted from their patrons
or artists exchanging imagery.81
Either Rao Bhoj Singh, who was the Mughal gover-
nor of Chunar and the Rajput ruler of Bundi, or his son
Ratan Singh was the patron of the Chunar Rāgamālā,
and it is Rao Bhoj Singh who is the subject of the 1606
portrait by the Bikaner artist Nur Muhammad, which
was described earlier (Fig. 11).82 Rao Bhoj Singh served
with Raja Rai Singh in the Deccan in 1601 and met him
again in 1605.83 Thus Nur Muhammad’s portrait links
the patron of the 1591 Chunar Rāgamālā to the likely
patron of the Laud Album Rāgamālā compositions.
Meanwhile, Abdul Rahim was fighting in the Deccan
when Rao Bhoj Singh and Raja Rai Singh were there,
and Rao Bhoj Singh’s son Kunwar Ratan Singh would
later build Ratanpur near Burhanpur, where Abdul
Rahim passed much of his time. Joachim Bautze notes
that Rao Bhoj Singh wears Deccani dress in the Nur
Muhammad portrait,84 and, indeed, Raja Rai Singh
was in Burhanpur in 1606 when Rao Bhoj Singh’s
portrait was made, though the inscription states it was
made in Bikaner.85
Here then are relationships that potentially explain
the similarities between the Rāgamālās produced at
Chunar and for the Bikaner court. It seems likely that
Rāgamālās became a social fashion among Rajput and
Mughal friends, and that the similarities among Rāga-
mālās in this period resulted from the circulation of
images among the mansabdāri elite.
That said, there is ˙a degree of overlap between the
paintings produced for Abdul Rahim and for Raja Rai
Singh (and/or his son Prince Surat Sigh) that is unique.
The Chunar Rāgamālā khākas did not leave the Chunar/
Bundi workshop, and while the Manley Rāgamālā com-
positions resemble the Chunar compositions to a strik-
ing degree, the former contains no exact copies of the
latter’s figures. By contrast, the Bikaner khākas are—
save that they are more detailed—identical to the Laud
Album compositions, apparent evidence of an unusually
close relationship between their patrons. I urge scholars
to consider the possibility that Abdul Rahim sometimes
shared artists with Raja Rai Singh and his son, and to
evaluate further evidence accordingly.
We should probably not imagine that artistic collab-
orations during this time always had to be formal
arrangements. The fluidity with which patrons shared
artists and with which artists sought out multiple patrons
may have resulted in communications that only seem
surprising to us now because of habits of art historical
labeling that assume regional styles and fixed allegiances.
These habits serve us well for many mid-seventeenth-
century and later paintings, but do not neatly square
with subimperial painting of the late sixteenth and early
seventeenth centuries. At best, we may only ever be able
to identify mobile spheres of intense pictorial exchange
among multiple agents.
Before continuing, it is worth recapitulating what
has been achieved so far. We have three pieces of paper
figured with tiny holes from a collection of workshop
materials belonging to the Lalani branch of the Usta
clan, which had served the Bikaner court since around
1600 (Figs. 1–3). Their paper, delicate workmanship,
the fashions worn by their figures, and their figurative
and architectural types are early seventeenth century.
Their compositions match in outline, scale, and in most
characteristics (though the paintings are less detailed)
three pages of the album that the Archbishop Laud
gave to the Bodleian Library in 1640 (Figs. 6, 8, 10).
However, their style does not match the style of the
Laud Album Rāgamālā pages, attributed by John Seyller
to Abdul Rahim’s artist Fazl. The khākas were probably
produced for the Bikaner royal family by artists work-
ing for them rather than for Abdul Rahim because: 1)
khākas mostly resided with the artist families who pro-
duced them; 2) the style of the khākas is consistent with
the style of Bikaner’s first artists who seem to have
trained at the Mughal court and who were illustrating
typical Hindu court imagery in a hybrid Mughal/mārga
style at Bikaner; and 3) Raja Rai Singh and/or his son
Kunwar Surat Singh patronized Rāgamālā series, where-
as neither Abdul Rahim nor any other non-Rajput
patron is associated with Rāgamālā imagery in the early
1600s (other than the Laud Rāgamālā pages them-
selves). The similar color preferences and color juxta-
positions, decorative motifs, and architectural, figural,
and facial types in the Usta khākas, the Laud Album
Rāgamālā paintings, the Usta, Berlin, and Manley Rāga-
mālās, the Bikaner Bhāgavatapurāna, and even Abdul
Rahim’s Razmnāma suggest the ˙possibility of fairly
 MOLLY EMMA AITKEN
extensive traffic having taken place between the Bikaner
royal family’s artists and Abdul Rahim’s artists. One
cannot speak of a clear stylistic boundary between the
works produced for these two patrons, though most
paintings were clearly made for either one or the other.
Finally, the khākas and the pictorial affiliations among
Rāgamālā paintings in this period encourage us to think
about personal relationships among high-ranking Mughal
officials—Muslim and Rajput—in our analyses of what
we call subimperial painting. Mansabdāri friendships
were probably a significant factor in˙ the constitution of
art in this period.
II. Analysis
Thus far, I have attempted to understand what the
Bikaner khākas were and how their compositions ended
up in the Laud Album. However, the exchange between
Raja Rai Singh and Abdul Rahim and the reuse of a
number of Rāgamālā pages in a muraqqa‘ now called
the Laud Album demands some interpretation. Raja Rai
Singh and Abdul Rahim shared one culture—that of the
Mughal court—but they were also Rajput/Rajasthani/
Hindu and Persian/Turkic/Muslim, respectively. What
did Raja Rai Singh’s Rāgamālā mean to Abdul Rahim?
The Emperor Akbar’s religious debates, explorations of
non-Muslim religious practices, Persian translations of
Sanskrit texts, and illustrated Hindu epics were signi-
ficantly motivated by politics and imperial ideology.
By contrast, the encounter between Raja Rai Singh and
Abdul Rahim seems to have been more social than
political. (Though I do not mean to suggest that social
and political impulses are neatly distinguishable.) Unlike,
for example, Akbar’s illustrated Harivamsa, the Laud
Rāgamālā paintings do not aim to educate a Persian-
speaking audience in Hindu culture; they do not com-
prise a full series or appear in their original order.
Juxtaposed with Arabic and Persian texts and with
paintings of other subjects in a type of manuscript that
belonged to the Mughal majlis, or assembly of friends,
and to its culture of connoisseurship, the Rāgamālā
images would have taken on new meanings and asso-
ciations. The final section of this essay interprets the
Rāgamālā paintings in the pictorial and social context
of the murraqa‘. The aim is to consider Muslim respon-
siveness to mārga culture among subimperial patrons,
and to think about whether non-Rajput audiences were
a factor in the sudden popularity and even constitution
of Rāgamālā imagery at this time.
The discovery of the Bikaner khākas engages with a
growing literature in South Asia on historical circula-
 Sociability of Subimperial Painting 47
tions of people, objects, traditions, practices, and beliefs.
‘‘Translation’’ is the term now increasingly used to de-
scribe the processes of cultural negotiation and transcul-
turation that follow from the mobility of people and
their things. Recently, Barry Flood has examined the
myriad translations in visual culture that characterized
Hindu-Muslim relationships from the eighth to early
thirteenth centuries. Flood draws on the sociologist Bruno
Latour’s definition of translation as ‘‘an explanatory
metaphor and a dynamic practice through which the
circulation, mediation, reception, and transformation of
distinct cultural forms and practices is effected.’’86 The
Bikaner khākas, Fazl’s Rāgamālā paintings, and the sub-
sequent re-situating of his paintings in the Laud Album
focus our attention on such circulations and translations
of imagery in the subimperial realm. Confounding, as
Flood puts it, ‘‘any attempt to draw hard-and-fast boun-
daries between cultural formations,’’ they point, I sug-
gest, to the possibility that translation was the sub-
imperial condition.87
If we accept that the Rāgamālā khākas were pro-
duced for Raja Rai Singh or his son Kunwar Surat
Singh, then Fazl’s paintings are not simply Rāgamālā
illustrations but responses to—and translations of—
existing Rāgamālā imagery in a non-Rajput domain.
Fazl made a key gesture toward the conventions of
what I am calling the mārga tradition of painting when
he imitated its abstracted backgrounds of solid colors,
one fading into the next (Figs. 6, 8, 10, 25). The khākas
did not dictate these backgrounds, which means that
Fazl chose, of his own accord, to reproduce them. He
had to have been conscious of working with an un-
familiar tradition, because the exclusive use of profile
and the focus on one to four characters in the fore-
ground of each composition would have been new to
an artist accustomed to creating Akbari-style composi-
tions roiling with figures in action and turned in multiple
views. The association of stylistic traditions with subject
matters (the Persian style for Persian subject matter, for
example, or the Mughal style for Mughal subjects) was
basic to Mughal and Rajput pictorial thinking. The
application at Bikaner of Mughal and mārga conven-
tions to different types of subject matter was discussed
earlier in this essay, and Seyller has noted the use of
Persianate conventions for Persian manuscripts in Abdul
Rahim’s workshop.88 From this perspective, it would
have been a matter of course for Fazl to match a Rāga-
mālā with its associated mārga conventions. However,
although Abdul Rahim’s Rāmāyana and Razmnāma
˙ they related more
reference Hindu imagery, stylistically
closely to Akbari than to mārga prototypes, making the
48 ARCHIVES OF ASIAN ART
Laud Album Rāgamālā pictures the only known examples
of an extensive engagement with the mārga pictorial tradi-
tion in Abdul Rahim’s workshop.
Fazl’s rounded chins, shaded with a curl, large eyes,
arches delineating the bellies of his heroines, and the
relative consistency of his figurations were noted earlier
as being novelties for Fazl. Even his outlines seem more
emphatic, though that may be a trick of the compara-
tively light backgrounds. It is worth considering whether
he was striving for the kind of prototypical, round-
fleshed ideal, which was a mainstay of mārga painting.
It was undoubtedly the invocation of this mode, together
with the Rāgamālā iconography and Rajput dress, which
inspired Hermann Goetz to attribute the paintings to
Rajput patronage.89 Were the Rāgamālā paintings to
have been found outside the Laud Album, they would
probably still be classified as early Rajput.
In one key respect Fazl was consistently unfaithful
to the Rāgamālā, however. Though he observed several
iconographic niceties, such as the gold skin of his Nata
Rāginı̄ horseman, he entirely ignored the temporal and ˙
seasonal changes so essential to Rāgamālā iconography.
Not even the rain of Vasanta Rāginı̄, which is clearly
depicted in the khākas, disrupts his yellow and blue
backgrounds (Figs. 9, 10). Together with the extraction
of the paintings from their original Rāgamālā sequence,
this omission of time and weather hints at a non-Rajput
engagement with the subject matter inspired by an out-
sider’s interests in its themes. In relation to the other
pages of the Laud Album, the Rāgamālā iconography
fades into the background, while the muraqqa‘ as a
whole brings the more generic themes of music, love,
and mystical yearning to the fore.
The Mughal album or muraqqa‘ remains an intrigu-
ing question mark in the study of Mughal painting, and
it is likely to prove key to understanding the Mughal ex-
perience of art.90 David Roxburgh’s extensive study of
the Persian muraqqa‘ describes a format for the making
of thoughtful, informed connections among existing
works of art.91 A similar kind of art historical thinking
was sometimes a feature of the early Mughal muraqqa‘:
two facing pages recently published from the Gulshan
Album, for example, juxtapose two works by Abdus
Samad, each produced for Nauroz (the Persian new year)
in half a day, but in different years, above two versions
of the same Bihzad composition, in an arrangement that
appears to be more about the making and history of art
than its iconographic content.92 The assembly of such
albums was an art in its own right.
The Laud Album was not as orchestrated as an
imperial Mughal album, and careful study remains to
determine whether it is now bound in its original arrange-
ment.93 Even so, the Laud Album is not bereft of mean-
ingful parallels or thematic coherence. On four pairs of
opposing pages, for example, the same verse is repeated
twice, once on each page, to invite a comparison of
calligraphic execution. Meanwhile, several thematic and
formal relationships link the album’s paintings to one
another.
The most obvious theme of the paintings is music.
In addition to the eighteen Rāgamālā pages, the Laud
Album includes a painting of a woman holding a vı̄nā
˙
(stringed instrument) and a portrait of Zain Khan Khoka,
a Mughal nobleman known to have loved rāgas and to
have been skilled at playing ‘‘Hindu music.’’94
Female beauty and eroticism are obvious themes, as
well. They are two of the principal themes of the Rāga-
mālā pages, which dominate because of their numbers,
but in addition they play out in pictures of a woman
who stretches her arms upwards in a position of yearn-
ing, exposing her breasts and arching her back (Fig. 26);
of a nearly nude beauty wringing out her long hair from
a bath; of a woman on a throne, receiving a flower from
an infant (Fig. 27); of the nāyikā with the vı̄nā, just
mentioned, and of a woman who holds open a ˙box, as
if to offer its contents to someone outside the frame.
This implicit association between the Rāgamālā
heroines and the other women in the album becomes
explicit in the first painting, which pictures a scantily
clad beauty stretching her arms up and back in a repli-
cation of the pose taken by Vairārı̄ Rāginı̄ on a later
page (Figs. 25, 26). She wears Rajput dress, including
a nearly see-through cholı̄. It is as if Vairārı̄ had been
decocted from her iconography to represent distilled
eroticism. The woman with the vı̄nā is a similar if more
subtle decoction, because she is ˙akin to the heroines
who carry instruments in the Rāgamālā pages but with-
out their iconographic specificity. To an aficionado of
Rāgamālās, she resembles a Todi Rāginı̄ without her
deer. ˙
While the Laud Album’s seminude bather with the
sinuous snake of hair does not relate to the Rāgamālā
pages, she probably alluded to Sanskrit and/or vernacular
sources. Bathing beauties were a subject of Persian paint-
ings like Muhammad Mumin’s just-bathed odalisque in
the Read Album in the Morgan Library & Museum.95
However, bathers wringing their hair often figured in
Hindu temple sculpture, and Joan Cummins’s research
into later Pahari versions of this image turned up
numerous antecedents from Sanskrit and vernacular
court poetry, such as the fourteenth-century poet Vidya-
pati’s ‘‘I saw my love when she was bathing, a stream of
water pouring from her hair . . . the filmy muslin clung
upon her breast.’’96 Meanwhile, the figuration of the
 MOLLY EMMA AITKEN
Fig. 26. Woman Stretching, from the Laud Rāgamālā Album,
early 17th c. Opaque watercolor and gold on paper (wasli),
page 38  24.6 cm. Bodleian Library, Oxford, MS. Laud Or.
149, fol. 2b.
Laud Album bather recurs in an early-seventeenth-
century illustration of Bhanudatta’s Rasamañjarı̄, in-
dicating that she was a Rajput pictorial type in the
period.97 She and the Laud heroine take virtually the
same pose, though the Laud beauty looks behind her.
It is possible that the viewers of the Laud would have
perceived this bather to refer to a nāyikā and to derive
from the mārga pictorial and/or temple sculpture tradi-
tions. The image’s subsequent popularity among Hindu
and Muslim viewers attests to its transcultural appeal.
Like the pseudo Vairārı̄ and Todi, she seems at least ini-
tially to have conveyed a rı̄ti ˙or a Hindu courtly flavor.
In fact, there is good reason to think that four out of
five of the non-Rāgamālā heroines in the Laud Album
answered to mārga or Rajput sources. The Rasamañjarı̄
page with the bather also includes a woman holding a
 Sociability of Subimperial Painting 49
Fig. 27. Woman with Infant, based on the parakı̄yā prosita
˙
nāyikā, from the Laud Rāgamālā Album, early 17th c. Opaque
watercolor and gold on paper, page 38  24.6 cm. Bodleian
Library, Oxford, MS. Laud Or. 149, fol. 44b.
dish, rather like the gift-giving heroine in the Laud, but
the type is too generic confidently to be associated with
specific sources and will be left aside here. More tanta-
lizing is the enthroned nāyikā in Rajput clothing who
receives a lotus from an infant on another of the Laud’s
non-Rāgamālā pages (Fig. 27). While women on thrones
became a common type, the infant, lotus, and cat suggest
a specific iconographic inspiration, and a likely source is
again suggested by the above-mentioned Rasamañjarı̄.
There the enthroned heroine appears as parakı̄yā prosita,
˙
a type of nāyikā who ‘‘belongs to another,’’ but whose
lover is away (Fig. 28).98 Sheldon Pollock’s translation
of the text reads ‘‘When her mother-in-law offered a
50 ARCHIVES OF ASIAN ART
Fig. 28. Detail from a Rasamañjarı̄ page picturing the parakı̄yā
prosita nāyikā. India, probably Mewar, early 17th c. Opaque
˙
watercolor and gold on paper. National Museum, New Delhi.
lotus leaf, she raised a brow in thanks but wouldn’t
touch it for fear it would dry to the point of kindling.’’99
The Rasamañjarı̄ illustration pictures the mother-in-law
on a throne and denotes her seniority by size, so that the
nāyikā looks like a child. In the Laud Album page, it is
clear that the enthroned woman, who sits in almost
exactly the same pose as the Rasamañjarı̄ mother-in-
law, is the nāyikā, while the diminutive nāyikā in the
Laud Album painting is a baby. The mutation makes
perfect sense: why would a Mughal connoisseur relish
an enthroned mother-in-law? The spirit of the verse is
respected, however, because the woman on the throne,
who now receives the lotus instead of proffering it,
does not quite touch the stem, for fear that it will ‘‘dry
to the point of kindling.’’ Several dull lotuses sag in the
infant’s hand, as if already wilting from the nāyikā’s
heat. The Rasamañjarı̄ series was probably made a de-
cade or two later than the Laud Album, but its parakı̄yā
prosita was presumably an established type, on which,
˙
I suggest, Abdul Rahim’s painter was drawing. If the
enthroned woman in the Laud Album was Bhanudatta’s
parakı̄yā prosita, the strange cat becomes meaningful,
too, because ˙the verses with which the poet introduces
the parakı̄yā nāyikā describe a woman pretending to her
husband’s family that the scratches her lover has left on
her flesh were the work of a cat: ‘‘How can I possibly
spend another night in that house? That cat of theirs is
forever springing out of a corner niche to catch a mouse,
and you see what all she’s done to me with her sharp
claws!’’100 Thus Abdul Rahim and/or his artist seem to
have been inventing Mughal-style imagery answering to
literary and pictorial sources favored by the Rajputs.
It is unlikely these echoes of Rāgamālā and Sanskritic
eroticism were coincidental. Jahangir described Abdul
Rahim as a polyglot of wide cultural interests: ‘‘He
knew Arabic, Turkish, Persian, and Hindi, and was
quite erudite in all sorts of rational and traditional
learning, even in Indian learning.’’101 Famed for his
poetry in Brajbhasha, a prestigious courtly vernacular,
Abdul Rahim, whose pen name was Rahim, is credited
with several works that feature Indian nāyikās. One
was his Avadhi Nagarśobhā (Lament for the City), ‘‘a
series of vignettes about the traits of Indian women of
different castes,’’ possibly modeled, according to Allison
Busch, after a Persian genre called the shahrāshūb, about
the charms of a city’s ‘‘handsome youth.’’102 Rahim
also authored a Brajbhasha collection, which explored
both a bhakti (Hindu devotional) theme and the mārga
trope of the twelve months. ‘‘The bhakti-oriented barvai
verses,’’ writes Busch, ‘‘are an experiment with the Indic
bārah-māsa motif that simultaneously exhibits the poet’s
deep knowledge of Krishnaite poetic conventions.’’103
Rahim wrote verses in the same meter on the nāyi-
kābheda, or types of nāyikā. In other words, the stretch-
ing beauty, the woman with the vı̄nā, the bather, and the
˙
enthroned woman with the baby, by uniting Sanskrit
and vernacular with Mughal conventions, directly relate
to the kinds of interests and experiments that were char-
acteristic of Rahim’s poetic oeuvre. The portrait of Zain
Khan Khoka further alludes to patronage circles with
interests in Hindu court culture because, Busch tells
us, he was a lover not only of rāgas but also of Hindi
poetry.104 There are intimations here of a realm of con-
noisseurship that recognized the value of mārga and
Persian art forms, and that encouraged the production
of new works out of both bodies of cultural knowledge.
Seventeenth-century Mughal painting gradually em-
braced innumerable such translations of nāyikā imagery,
shifting away from the Persian preference for the beauti-
ful boy toward a greater attention to female beauty and
the poetics of heterosexual love, though the former re-
mained a theme. Figures seemingly based in Rāgamālā
or other mārga iconographies, but similarly loosed from
their original contexts, would eventually abound. The
specific exchanges that fed a Mughal mainstreaming of
mārga love imagery have mostly gone unstudied, though
 MOLLY EMMA AITKEN
Deborah Hutton’s and Debra Diamond’s discussions of
a similar mainstreaming of the yoginı̄ image at Bijapur
contribute pieces to the puzzle.105 In any case, the paint-
ings in the Laud Album exemplify a relatively early
moment in this history.
Encompassing the leitmotifs of music and erotic love
in the Laud Album is the overarching idea of the Mughal
gentleman’s pleasures: music, beautiful women, pigeon
keeping, hunting with the hawk, entertainment, and
gift giving. The depiction in the Laud Album of a com-
posite palanquin of women, cradling a coddled prince,
refers to one of the more peculiar pleasures of court
life. According to the mid-seventeenth-century traveler
Jean-Baptiste Tavernier, the courtesans at the court of
the Golconda Shah could ‘‘represent the form of an ele-
phant, four making the four feet, four others the body,
and one the trunk, [with] the King, mounted above on
a kind of throne.’’106 One wonders if such feats were
especially associated with the courtesans of the Deccan.
Meanwhile, the picture of pigeons, though itself common
album content, seems to have implied a now forgotten
association with the portrayed Zain Khan Khoka, be-
cause a similar picture of pigeons appears below a por-
trait of that gentleman on a single album page now in
the British Library.107 Meanwhile, the muraqqa‘ itself
made a theme of the elite pastimes of calligraphy and
looking at painting, which were also social pleasures to
be shared with friends and lovers.
Only one page, the picture of the Sufi, seems to
stand out from this thematic background. With his eyes
closed and his head tilted as if in a trance, he is the
opposite of social pleasure. Preliminary readings of the
calligraphy suggest the painting of the Sufi picks up on
a mystical theme in the album’s written pages. In keep-
ing with what we know of Abdul Rahim’s beliefs, the
calligraphic passages of the muraqqa‘ draw from Shia,
Sunni, and especially Sufi texts.108 For example, Alasdair
Watson has identified a verse from Jami’s treatise on
Sufism, ‘‘Flashes of Light’’ or Lawā‘ih, on the page
˙
opposite the painting of the stretching beauty:
O Thou whose sacred precincts none may see,
Unseen Thou makest all things seen to be;
Thou and we are not separate, yet still
Thou has no need of us, but we of Thee.109
The Sufi, who is the sole figure physically oriented
toward the viewer, shuts his eyes to him, similarly ex-
pressing devotion to a God who cannot be seen. His
closed eyes seem to reject the Laud Album’s myriad en-
ticements to look.
Yet, the Sufi is not the anomaly he initially appears
to be. Mughal-era texts on comportment and masculinity
stressed the importance of a nobleman’s spiritual en-
 Sociability of Subimperial Painting 51
deavors to his self-realization. Cultivation of the spiri-
tual, moral, and sensual self pertained to what in Islamic
culture was called ādāb, a concept Rosalind O’Hanlon
describes as a ‘‘fusing together’’ of ‘‘practical action and
spiritual meaning . . . at once moral training, cultivation
of manner, bodily discipline and spiritual refinement.’’
‘‘In more cosmopolitan cultural settings,’’ she elaborates,
‘‘ādāb also denoted a generalized ideal of civilized and
cultured behavior in which non-Muslim men could
share.’’110 Rajeev Kumar Kinra has likewise noted the
importance in seventeenth-century Mughal writings ‘‘of
mysticism and the Sufi idiom as a significant feature not
just of the world of religious divines, but also of edu-
cated parlance generally during this period.’’111 That
spirituality was a necessary component of the gentle-
man’s cultured life is born out by the ubiquity of saints,
dervishes, Sufis, and yogis in other seventeenth-century
Mughal muraqqa‘ like the Salim Album or the Dara
Shikoh Album. The Mughal mirzāı̄, or cultured elite,
evidently enjoyed connoisseurship of the arts with a
clear awareness of the limited rewards promised by
sensual pleasure from a spiritual purview. In the words
of the early-seventeenth-century Mughal writer Baqir,
whom O’Hanlon discusses at length, ‘‘the individual
who gallops his steed of courage in the field of content-
ment should be considered a man. He is neither exhi-
larated on having material things, nor expresses regrets
on their loss.’’112
The Sufi also potentially relates to the many refer-
ences to the divine in the Rāgamālā pages. Calligraphic
passages in the Laud Album allude to Allah in Sufi
terms as the beloved.113 Someone familiar with Rāga-
mālās would have known them often to picture their
heroes as Krishna, and typically to have included yogis
meditating beside shrines and women in the garb of
ascetics meditating on their absent beloveds. In the Laud
Album, Bhairavı̄ Rāginı̄ worships at Shiva’s shrine. ‘‘Out
in the lake, in a shrine of crystal, she worships Siva with
songs punctuated by the beat’’ goes a dhyāna frequently
provided for this rāginı̄.114 More explicit would have
been the association of Krishna with the hero of Vasanta
Rāginı̄ (Fig. 10): ‘‘His topknot, bound with peacock
feathers, is erect; his face, because of the burgeoning
mango-shoot, is as a flower. Elephantlike, in the forest
joyfully he wanders among the gopis, (such is) Vasanta
Raga [sic].’’115
The recontextualization of Rāgamālā paintings in
the Laud Album thus brought out those of its themes
most piquant to the Mughal gentleman and his friends.
The Laud Album is, to date, the earliest Mughal pic-
torial expression of a taste for the Rāgamālā, which
would become a significant feature of elite Mughal social
circles later in the seventeenth century. Abul Fazl had
52 ARCHIVES OF ASIAN ART
earlier described Rāgamālās in his Ā’ı̄n-i-Akbarı̄, where
he noted the Hindu belief that the god Shiva and his
wife Parvati invented the rāga-rāginı̄ system. He assigned
it to ‘‘marga or the lofty style as chanted by the gods
and great Rishis.’’116 By the later seventeenth century,
Mughal patrons of rāgas were embracing them as canon-
ical elite knowledge. Katherine Butler Schofield has found
that Mughal treatises on Indian music were written by
elite connoisseurs for elite connoisseurs rather than for
musicians, and that knowledge of Indian music was cul-
tivated in the kinds of social circles to which the Laud
Album would have belonged. ‘‘Music was patronized
through a series of friendship circles with mutual inter-
ests in music, poetry, and Sufism.’’117
According to Schofield, rāgas and rāginı̄s also be-
came associated with Unani medicine. Keeping the
body’s humors in balance was essential for an elite
Mughal male. Islamic tradition had long held that
music could affect the bodily humors, and in India music
was linked to the Ayurvedic humors as early as the
thirteenth century.118 What probably made the rāgas
and rāginı̄s intriguing for Unani medicine were their
relationships with days and seasons. Schofield quotes
the late-seventeenth-century theorist Ras Bara Khan:
‘‘in the second prahar of the day, when the sun is shin-
ing and it is hot, Rāgas which emphasize the watery
swaras (Sa and Pa) should be performed to balance the
heat with cold.’’119 In Schofield’s own words: ‘‘[T]o the
Mughal male elite, the role of music in ameliorating the
ill effects of humoral imbalance or the adverse influence
of the stars was fundamental to its purpose. . . . [T]he
extramusical associations of the rāgas, and in particular
their auspicious timings, became indispensable to the
wellbeing of listeners in the mehfil (gathering).’’120 It is
unclear whether the medical dimension of music was
important for the Rajputs this early in the seventeenth
century, but in this connection it is worth noting Raja
Rai Singh’s interest in medicine, expressed in his Rai-
Singh-Mahotsav.121
For centuries, both Indic and Persian elite socializ-
ing had, separately, centered on the consumption and
production of the arts. Muslim and Rajput courtiers,
now brought together, would have faced the challenge
of socializing with one another without recourse to one
another’s canons of cultural knowledge. The milieux for
this socializing were the majlis and the mehfil, men’s
assemblies typically organized around food, wine, poetry,
music, dance, and sometimes spiritual discourse. Majlis
and mehfil were Persian terms that made their way into
the Rajput lexicon, though the Rajputs would also have
used the Indic word ‘‘akhāro.’’122 The muraqqa‘ was an
art form for the majlis: in Persia, as Roxburgh has
written, ‘‘members of the court formed an audience
of arbiters, some of whom were also practitioners,
who would gather to contemplate its contents—calligra-
phies, paintings, drawings, and illumination—and dis-
cuss them.’’123 The social themes of the Laud Album
seem to speak to similar reception in Mughal India.
Recent research into the cultural and social dimen-
sions of Mughal life is now beginning to serve up valuable
descriptions of how life at court integrated the practice
of rule with the pleasures of social exchange. In his study
of the imperial mumśı̄ Chandar Bhan, for example,
Rajeev Kinra gives us ˙ the mumśı̄’s description of how
˙
Shah Jahan (r. 1627–1658) exercised his authority over
extravagant breakfasts of ‘‘amber-scented confections’’
and elephant fights.124 As the emperor’s albums were
brought for his perusal, intellectual debate proceeded
in one part of the room, poets praised the emperor in
another, while in a third corner, the imperial secretaries
continued with their work.125
Such gatherings were replicated, though less grandly,
throughout the Mughal empire. According to Chandar
Bhan: ‘‘the Khan-i Khanan’s bravery, bold ingenuity,
fortitude, presence of mind, excellence, and all-around
perfection, not to mention the pleasure of his company
and the circle of scholars and wordsmiths and other
intellectuals in the said Khan’s atelier, was brighter than
the sun. When he was in the Deccan, in his meetings/
assemblies these other folks used to also convene in
his assembly.’’ Mughal administrators stationed in the
Deccan held their own mehfils, ‘‘many of which,’’ in
Kinra’s paraphrase of Chandar Bhan, ‘‘were integrated
as part of the same intellectual network as that of Abdul
Rahim.’’126 No doubt Raja Rai Singh was part of
this network and hosted such gatherings himself. Rima
Hooja notes a verse traditionally ascribed to Akbar,
which praises the social charms of Raja Rai Singh’s
brother Peethal: ‘‘With the death of Peethal have gone
the pleasures of the majlis.’’127
To close, the recontextualization of Rāgamālā pages
in a Persianate muraqqa‘ raises several intriguing ques-
tions about Mughal receptions of what I have been
calling mārga culture. If we were to extrapolate from
the Laud Album, to what extent would we find mārga
heroines and erotic imagery permeating Mughal culture
by way of spontaneous, pleasurable exchanges among
Mughal friends of different religious and cultural back-
grounds rather than by way of the more programmatic
responses to Hindu religion and court culture sponsored
by the emperors Akbar and Jahangir? And if Rajput arts
were a fixture of the early-seventeenth-century Mughal
majlis, to what degree might the Mughal connoisseur’s
interest in Rāgamālās have stimulated the Rajputs to have
 MOLLY EMMA AITKEN
them illustrated? Busch has proposed that late-sixteenth-
and early-seventeenth-century patronage within the ‘‘Per-
sian political ecumene’’ was an important factor in the
cultural success of Brajbhasha court poetry,128 while
Schofield has drawn attention to the significant impetus
Mughal patronage gave to Hindustani music.129 There
is no question that the imperial Mughal workshop in-
spired the Rajput elite to patronize paintings, but the
larger cultural context suggests that the conspicuous
use of mārga conventions to illustrate Rāgamālās and
other Rajput courtly texts followed the pattern of litera-
ture and music. If Rāgamālās were intended for majlis-
style social gatherings, then their mārga compartments,
abstractions, bright reds, and other related conventions
were not insular expressions. Instead, they may have been
attempts to canonize or ‘‘classicize,’’ to use Schofield’s
term, the mārga pictorial tradition in Mughal culture.
The Laud Rāgamālā Album is a reminder that Rajput
painting originated out of social interaction, not regional
isolation. No one, it turns out, was absolutely wrong
about the Laud Album: it was, in fact, probably a
Deccani tome that was also Rajput, but that was
produced for the subimperial nobleman par excellence,
Abdul Rahim. All such definitions make sense given the
social, mobile, subimperial conditions of its production.
More than raising questions of connoisseurial practice,
though, these conditions indicate Rajput visual arts of
the era were addressing Mughal society rather than
pulling away from it, and could potentially change how
we understand what it meant to be Rajput in late-
sixteenth and early-seventeenth-century Mughal India
and what Rajput culture meant to the Mughals.
Molly Emma Aitken is associate professor at The
City College of New York. Her book, The Intelligence
of Tradition in Rajput Court Painting (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 2010), received the Charles Rufus
Morey Award in 2011 and the Ananda Kentish Coo-
maraswamy Book Prize in 2012. Aitken specializes in
Mughal and Rajput painting, and has published and cu-
rated on a range of topics including contemporary folk
art and South Asian jewelry. [maitken@ccny.cuny.edu]
Notes
1. For a concise discussion of this policy, see Catherine
B. Asher and Cynthia Talbot, India Before Europe (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). Asher and
Talbot offer the translation ‘‘universal toleration’’ (129).
2. I have used the Library of Congress systems to
transliterate Devanāgarı̄ and Persian. I have not used dia-
critics in the names of persons, gods/goddesses, or places.
 Sociability of Subimperial Painting 53
3. What scholars call ‘‘pre-Mughal’’ painting refers
to a host of varied styles. The so-called Candayana and
Caurapañcasika styles are especially relevant here. For
extensive discussions of ‘‘subimperial’’ art and architec-
ture, see, especially, the publications of Catherine Asher
and John Seyller.
4. I would like to thank Shanane Davis for her assis-
tance with this project and for our productive discussions
of the issues. I would also like to thank John Seyller and
Allison Busch for their generous feedback on this essay.
5. Shanane Davis, The Bikaner School of Usta Arti-
sans and Their Heritage (Jodhpur: RMG Exports, 2008).
The collection is also discussed in Molly Aitken and Sha-
nane Davis with Yana Van Dycke, ‘‘Old Methods in a
New Era: What Can Connoisseurship Tell Us About
Rukn-ud-din?’’ in A Companion to Asian Art and Archi-
tecture, ed. Rebecca M. Brown and Deborah S. Hutton
(Oxford: Blackwell, 2011), 233–63.
6. The Bhagnagar painting is inscribed in Hindi:
‘‘Bought at Bhagnagar, purchase price 800 rupees, checked
today in 1693.’’ Mark Zebrowski noted that the inscrip-
tion resembled inscriptions on other Deccani paintings in
the Bikaner Palace Collection. Mark Zebrowksi, Deccani
Painting (London: Philip Wilson; New Delhi: Roli Books
International, 1983), 207. The Usta tracing of this painting
has been reproduced in Davis, The Bikaner School, section
I, pl. 48. The equestrian drawing of Maharaja Anup Singh
is unpublished, but one equestrian portrait based on it is
published in Basil Gray, Treasures of Indian Miniatures in
the Bikaner Palace Collection (Oxford: Bruno Cassirer,
1951), pl. 8; and a second is in the Asian Art Museum,
San Francisco, no. B86D13. The drawing initially rendered
Anup Singh’s back arm lowered, as it appears in the paint-
ing in Gray, then effaced that version to raise the hand
bearing the spear, in the manner depicted in the San Fran-
cisco version. The drawing of the woman worshipping a
Shiva liṅga is reproduced in Davis, The Bikaner School,
section II, pl. 23. The corresponding painting is in the
Museum für Indische Kunst, Berlin, and is reproduced
in Ernst Waldschmidt and Rose Leonore Waldschmidt,
Miniatures of Musical Inspiration in the Collection of the
Berlin Museum of Indian Art (Bombay: Popular Prakashan,
1967), fig. 117. The drawing of Sulaiman is reproduced
in Davis, The Bikaner School, section I, pl. 81, while the
corresponding painting, which is in the Isabella and Vicky
Ducrot collection, is reproduced in Vicky Ducrot, Four
Centuries of Rajput Painting (Milan: Skira, 2009), DN4.
The Rashid painting is published in Hermann Goetz, The
Art and Architecture of Bikaner State (Oxford: Bruno
Cassirer, 1950), pl. 77. At that time, it was in the Lalgarh
Palace collection. Rashid modeled his painting almost
exactly on a depiction of Aurangzeb hunting now in the
Chester Beatty Library, Dublin (no. 11A.28), but replaced
Aurangzeb’s with Anup Singh’s portrait.
7. Molly Aitken, ‘‘On Tradition in Nineteenth-Century
Indian Painting: Definitions at Odds in the Paintings of
54 ARCHIVES OF ASIAN ART
Rahim, Chotu, and Abanindranath Tagore’’ (working title;
manuscript in process).
8. I have recently found a number of drawings with
the same kinds of workshop markings and in the same
styles, many of them of related compositions, still in the
possession of Usta artists in India. Several local sources
confirm that much of the collection was sold in the 1950s.
9. For the phrase ‘‘khāka jharana,’’ see Moti Chandra,
The Technique of Mughal Painting (Lucknow: U.P. His-
torical Society, 1949), 39.
10. John Seyller, Workshop and Patron in Mughal
India: The Freer Ramayana and Other Illustrated Manu-
scripts of ‘Abd al-Rahim, Artibus Asiae Supplementum 42
(Zurich: Artibus Asiae, 1999).
11. In addition to Seyller’s work, the significant litera-
ture on the Laud Rāgamālā Album is: Herbert J. Stooke
and Karl Khandalavala, The Laud Ragamala Miniatures:
A Study in Indian Painting and Music (Oxford: Bruno
Cassirer, 1953); Hermann Goetz, ‘‘The Laud Album and
Early Rajput Painting,’’ The Journal of the Royal Asiatic
Society of Great Britain and Ireland 1/2 (April 1954): 63–
74; and Karl Khandalavala, ‘‘The Laud Ragamala Minia-
tures,’’ Marg 6, no. 4 (1953): 26–29.
12. For high-resolution reproductions of the paintings
in the manuscript, search ‘‘Laud Ragamala’’ in the Oxford
Digital Image Library’s ‘‘Masterpieces of the non-Western
Book’’ at http://www.odl.ox.ac.uk/digitalimagelibrary/
oriental_home.html.
13. Goetz, in ‘‘The Laud Album,’’ pointed to Rajput
dress in the Laud Rāgamālā pages to support his convic-
tion that they were produced in Amber.
14. David Roxburgh, ‘‘Persian Drawing, ca. 1400–
1450: Materials and Creative Procedures,’’ in Muqarnas
XIX: An Annual on the Visual Culture of the Islamic
World (Leiden: Brill, 2002), 44–77.
15. Ewers without handles are mentioned by Mark
Zebrowski, Gold, Silver, and Bronze from Mughal India
(London: Alexandria Press, 1997), figs. 196–197.
16. Khandalavala, ‘‘The Laud Ragamala Miniatures,’’
and Goetz, ‘‘The Laud Album.’’ For references to the album
as ‘‘provincial Mughal’’ and ‘‘subimperial,’’ see, for ex-
ample, Harold Powers, ‘‘Illustrated Inventories of Indian
Ragamala Painting,’’ Journal of the American Oriental
Society, 110/4 (October–December 1980), 490; and Klaus
Ebeling, Ragamala Painting (New Delhi: Ravi Kumar,
1973), 163.
17. Seyller, Workshop and Patron, 207, 257–63.
18. Ibid., 258. I believe all the Rāgamālā paintings in
the album are by the same artist.
19. Ibid., 259.
20. The painting is in the collection of Harvard Uni-
versity’s Arthur M. Sackler Museum, no. 2009.202.250.
At the time of publication, a reproduction is available
through an online search of the collection at www.harvard
artmuseums.org/collection/. For Abul Fazl’s use of the
word ‘‘daṁriyā’’ to describe the cloth that goes over the
head and is ˙fastened at the waist, see Abul Fazl-i-al-Allámı́,
A‘in-i Akbari, Volume III, trans. Colonel H. S. Jarrett
(New Delhi: Oriental Books Reprint, 1978), 342.
21. Seyller, Workshop and Patron, 76.
22. Rima Hooja, History of Rajasthan (New Delhi:
Rupa and Co., 2006), 544–47.
23. Seyller, Workshop and Patron, 56–57.
24. Seyller, Workshop and Patron, 46; Annemarie
Schimmel, ‘‘A Dervish in the Guise of a Prince: Khan-i
Khanan ‘Abd al-Rahim as a Patron,’’ in The Powers of
Art: Patronage in Indian Culture, ed. Barbara Stoler Miller
(Delhi and New York: Oxford University Press, 1992),
209–10.
25. For reproductions of the Rāmāyana in the Freer,
˙
see http://www.asia.si.edu/collections/search.cfm, and search
‘‘Freer Ramayana’’ or ‘‘F1907.271.’’
26. Davis, The Bikaner School, 52; Melia Belli, ‘‘Royal
Umbrellas of Stone: Memory, Political Propaganda, and
Public Identity,’’ PhD diss., University of California, Los
Angeles, 2009, 225. Davis interviewed Jamil Usta, grand-
son of Hisam-ud-din; Belli interviewed Zahar-ud Din Usta.
27. Davis published the genealogy in The Bikaner
School, fold-out. Hermann Goetz Art and Architecture,
101, mentions Shah Muhammad as the father of Nur
Muhammad.
28. Reproduced in Karl J. Khandalavala, Moti Chandra,
and Pramod Chandra, Miniature Paintings from the Sri
Motichand Khajanchi Collection (New Delhi: Lalit Kala
Akademi, 1960), fig. 82, no. 114.
29. Naval Krishna, ‘‘Bikaneri Miniature Painting Work-
shops of Ruknuddin, Ibrahim, and Nathu,’’ Lalit Kala 21
(1990): 23–27.
30. Though Khandalavala, Chandra, and Chandra,
Miniature Paintings, no. 114, estimated it to have been
produced in the last quarter of the seventeenth century.
31. Milo C. Beach, ‘‘Farrukh Beg,’’ in Masters of
Indian Painting, ed. Milo C. Beach, Eberhard Fischer,
and B. N. Goswamy, Artibus Asiae Supplementum 48 I/II
(Zurich: Artibus Asiae Publishers, 2011), 1:194.
32. A couple of Akbar-period Mughal manuscript
pages are ascribed to a Shah Muhammad. The name was
reasonably common, so one cannot assume that the two
were the same. However, though I have not seen these
paintings, which have not been published, John Seyller
‘‘has no doubt’’ the Shah Muhammad who participated
in these manuscripts was the Bikaner Shah Muhammad
(personal communication, 1 August 2012). One is a page
from the Keir Collection’s Keir Khamsa of Nizami and
the other is from the 1584 Timurnama in the Khuda Baksh
Public Library. Shah Muhammad’s involvement in these
manuscripts is noted in Milo Beach, The Imperial Image:
Paintings for the Mughal Court (Washington, DC: Freer
Gallery of Art, 1981), 218, 221.
33. Goetz, Art and Architecture, 97–98.
34. For example, Davis, The Bikaner School, section I,
pls. 32, 33, 37. Other Mughal-style drawings in the Usta
collection, in particular a drawing of the Virgin Mary (I,
pl. 40); a siyah qalam (monochrome drawing) of Mary,
 MOLLY EMMA AITKEN
Jesus, and angels (I, pl. 39); and a nim qalam of the
Prophet Sulaiman with angels (I, pl. 81) almost certainly
follow from well-documented contacts with Mughal paint-
ing and painters at Bikaner in the mid- to later seventeenth
century.
35. Now in the Gursharan and Elvira Sidhu Collec-
tion. Published in Gray, Treasures of Indian Miniatures,
pl. IV.
36. Joachim K. Bautze, ‘‘Early Painting at Bundi,’’
in Court Painting in Rajasthan, ed. Andrew Topsfield
(Mumbai: Marg Publications, 2000), 13–14. Bhoj Singh’s
appearance is also known from a portrait of him in the
Arthur M. Sackler Museum, Harvard Art Museum,
no. 2009.202.39, recently reproduced in Milo C. Beach,
‘‘The Masters of the Chunar Ragamala and the Hada
Master,’’ in Masters of Indian Painting, 1:fig. 10.
37. I am grateful to John Seyller for bringing this
painting to my attention. Pramod Chandra, in R. C.
Sharma et al., Indian Art Treasures: Suresh Neotia Collec-
tion (New Delhi: Mosaic Books, 2006), 135, expresses
some doubt about the inscription on the Goenka painting,
because the painting is in an Akbari style. However, the
evidence presented in this chapter, and the Akbari style of
Nur Muhammad’s other known paintings, seem to support
the evidence of the inscription.
38. In Darielle Mason et al., Intimate Worlds: Indian
Paintings from the Alvin O. Bellak Collection (Philadel-
phia: Philadelphia Museum of Art, 2001), 56, John Seyller
notes ‘‘the many similarities’’ between the Goenka painting
inscribed to Nur Muhammad and a Rāmāyana painting
inscribed to Nur Muhammad that came up for˙ auction at
Christie’s in 2000 (Christie’s, London, Islamic Art and
Manuscripts, Sale 6374, October 10, 2000, lot 59). The
Rāmāyana page is now in the Museum of Islamic Art,
˙ painting belongs to a manuscript dated 1594,
Qatar. The
twelve years before the Bhoj Singh portrait was produced.
A colophon in the manuscript states it was ‘‘translated by
the order of his Royal Majesty,’’ and two further notes
identify it as the property of Humayun’s wife Hamida
Banu Begum. I have not been able to see the painting in
person, but reproductions suggest some affinity with the
portrait of Bhoj Singh. Its main figures are also framed
against a narrow gray arch, its figural forms are somewhat
simplified, its faces share with Bhoj Singh the same abbre-
viated eye and simple brow; the black foliated band above
the central characters strongly resembles the band above
Bhoj Singh’s arch, and the crenellations in both paintings
feature the same stylized floret. See also Linda Leach,
Paintings from India, Nasser D. Khalili Collection of
Islamic Art, vol. 8 (London: Nour Foundation with Azimuth
Editions and Oxford University Press, 1998), 40–49.
39. Collection of Catherine and Ralph Benkaim. My
thanks to Catherine Glynn Benkaim for bringing the paint-
ing to my attention. An inscription on the back identifies
the man as ‘‘Kunwar Sur Singh.’’
40. Sur is referred to sometimes as Surat Singh and
sometimes as Suraj Singh. In his memoirs, Jahangir calls
 Sociability of Subimperial Painting 55
him Suraj Singh. Jahangir, The Jahangirnama, trans. and
ed. Wheeler M. Thackston (Washington, DC: Smithsonian
Institution; New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 134.
41. John Seyller, in Intimate Worlds, 66, writes: ‘‘the
spare compositions, cool palette, and pronounced linear
quality of this Bhagavata Purana series are akin to those
of paintings produced at Bikaner in the last third of the
seventeenth century.’’ Another painting with a Bikaner
palace stamp in a nearly identical style has recently come
to light, which may further help substantiate the assump-
tion that the Bhāgavatapurāna is an early Bikaner series.
The sahelis (friends) in this˙ unpublished painting could
have stepped from a page of the Bhāgavatapurāna series.
Pramod Chandra describes the attribution to Bikaner ˙ of
the Bhāgavatapurāna as ‘‘unsubstantiated’’ in Sharma et al.,
˙ 135.
Indian Art Treasures,
42. I strongly believe that we need a term to describe
these conventions. It has been a struggle to come up with
a good label, and I want to thank Allison Busch for pro-
posing ‘‘marga’’ (personal communication, October 2012).
It remains to be seen whether marga is the best term, so I
use it provisionally here. In using it, I am also following
Katherine Butler Schofield’s lead. She applies the term
marga to Indian musical traditions that fit what she pre-
cisely lays out as the terms by which classical or marga
status can be said to have been attained. Katherine Butler
Schofield, ‘‘Reviving the Golden Age: ‘Classicization,’ Hin-
dustani Music, and the Mughals,’’ Ethnomusicology 54:3
(Fall 2010), 484–517.
43. Ebeling, Ragamala Painting, 56–62.
44. Katherine Butler Brown [now Schofield], ‘‘Hindu-
stan Music in the Time of Aurangzeb,’’ PhD diss., School
of Oriental and African Studies, University of London,
2003. For an excellent recent treatment of Rāgamālā
painting, see Catherine Glynn, Robert Skelton, and Anna
L. Dallapiccola, Ragamala Paintings from India from the
Claudio Moscatelli Collection (London: Dulwich Picture
Gallery with Philip Wilson, 2011).
45. Brown, ‘‘Hindustani Music,’’ 179.
46. This impression was reaffirmed in discussion with
Katherine Butler Schofield and Allyn Miner, summer 2011,
London.
47. For the Jain series, see Ebeling, Ragamala Paint-
ing, 120–21; Robert Skelton, ‘‘Ragamalas in the Deccan
and What Happens when Ragas Migrate Without Their
Texts,’’ in Glynn, Skelton, and Dallapiccola, Ragamala
Paintings from India, 23–28.
48. W. Norman Brown, ‘‘Some Early Rajasthani Raga
Paintings,’’ Journal of the Indian Society of Oriental Art
16 (1948): 1–10; Anand Krishna, ‘‘An Early Ragamala
Series,’’ Ars Orientalis 4 (1961): 368–72.
49. As I note later, the assumption that Devanāgarı̄
texts of this period were necessarily produced for Rajputs
may need to be reexamined. Rahim, for instance, was pro-
ficient in Brajbhasha and Sanskrit, and may have patron-
ized some of the Devanāgarı̄ illustrated series that scholars
have not yet been able to place.
56 ARCHIVES OF ASIAN ART
50. Pages from this series are noted and or reproduced
in: Sotheby’s, London, Fine Oriental Miniatures and Manu-
scripts, 11 July 1973, lot 235; Alice N. Heeramaneck,
Masterpieces of Indian Painting Formerly in the Nasli
M. Heeramaneck Collections (Verona: A. N. Heeramaneck,
1984), pl. 228; Armand Neven, Peintures des Indes:
Mythologies et legendes (Bruxelles: Studio du Passage 44,
1976), 94, nos. 77, 78; Sotheby Parke-Bernet, New York,
Important Tibetan, Nepalese, Indian and Southeast Asian
Works of Art, 10 December 1981, lot 19; Amy Poster,
Realms of Heroism: Indian Paintings at the Brooklyn
Museum (New York: Hudson Hills Press with the Brooklyn
Museum, 1994), no. 33; at the San Diego Museum of Art,
no. 1990.319; at the Bharat Kala Bhavan, Varanasi, repro-
duced on ArtStor; and one page is in a private collection.
The sizes of these pages are not always given, and the bor-
ders are in varied conditions, but the size of the Brooklyn
page (Brooklyn Museum, no. 78.187.1), for example, which
has roughly the same amount of its borders intact, matches
the size of the Usta page. All but one of the pages and the
Usta page discussed here have been listed in Glynn, Skelton,
and Dallapiccola, Ragamala Paintings from India, 64. The
Heeramaneck page was sold at Sotheby’s, New York, The
Heeramaneck Collection of Indian Sculpture, Paintings and
Textiles, November 2, 1988, lot 96.
51. Elsewhere the Berlin Rāgamālā is distinguished
from what is sometimes called Rāgamālā Series B: I
consider them part of one manuscript. There are indica-
tions that one page associated with this series (LACMA,
M.74.5.14) was extensively overpainted, with the inscrip-
tion written on the side copied incorrectly. The page some-
what muddies the waters, though it seems to be an isolated
example, possibly of an original so damaged that someone
chose to overpaint it on the model of the corresponding
Berlin Rāgamālā page.
52. Compare the Kāmoda Rāginı̄ from the Usta Rāga-
mālā (Brooklyn Museum of Art, no. 79.187.1) with the
Berlin Rāgamālā Todi Rāginı̄ in the Chhatrapati Shivaji
˙
Maharaj Vastu Sangrahalaya, Mumbai. As of June 2012,
the Brooklyn page could be found on ArtStor.
53. Pratapaditya Pal, The Classical Tradition in Rajput
Painting from the Paul F. Walter Collection (New York:
Pierpont Morgan Library, 1978), 56.
54. Vaṅgāla Rāginı̄, in the Museum für Indische
Kunst, Berlin, is reproduced in Waldschmidt and Wald-
schmidt, Miniatures of Musical Inspiration, fig. 133; the
Philadelphia Museum of Art’s Bhāgavatapurāna page, no.
2004-149-17, is reproduced in Mason, Intimate˙ Worlds, 67.
55. Vairārı̄ Rāginı̄, Metropolitan Museum of Art,
no. 1981.464.1; the Goenka page is reproduced in B. N.
Goswamy with Usha Bhatia, Painted Visions: The Goenka
Collection of Indian Paintings (New Delhi: Lalit Kala Aka-
demi, 1999), cat. 84.
56. See, for example, the cholı̄ in Deśvarārı̄ Rāginı̄ at
the Metropolitan Museum, no. 1987.417.2, and in a half-
page remnant from a Bhāgavatapurāna in the Brooklyn
Museum, no. 84.201.2. ˙ the-collections, search ‘‘2002.176’’ (accessed June 2012).
57. For a reproduction of the Usta Rāgamālā Vasanta
Rāginı̄, see Neven, Peintures des Indes, cat. 78.
58. Waldschmidt and Waldschmidt, Miniatures of
Musical Inspiration, 427, noted that the text panels of the
Manley Rāgamālā are ‘‘in the same manner and the same
characters as the Berlin specimens.’’ For reproductions of
the full manuscript, see the British Museum on-line collec-
tion, http://www.britishmuseum.org/research/search_the_
collection_database.aspx, and search ‘‘Manley Ragamala.’’
59. Daniel Ehnbom, Indian Miniatures: The Ehrenfeld
Collection (New York: Hudson Hills Press with the Amer-
ican Federation of Arts, 1985), 50.
60. Compare, for example, the flowering plants along
the riverbank in a Bhāgavatapurāna scene of Balarama with
˙
the gopas, which has been reproduced by Sam Fogg with
the flowering plants at the base of the Manley Rāgamālā’s
Hindola Rāga (British Museum, no. 1973,0917,0.40). The
˙˙
Bhāgavatapurān a scene has been reproduced in Indian
˙
Paintings and Manuscripts 21 (London: Sam Fogg, 1999),
cat. 23.
61. Robert Cran placed the Manley Rāgamālā in Agra
on the basis of the Hindi dialect that follows the Sanskrit
inscription, but Allison Busch (personal communication)
finds no support for this claim. Robert Cran, ‘‘The Manley
Ragamala: An Album of Indian Illustrated Musical Modes,’’
The British Museum Yearbook 4: Music and Civilization
(London: British Museum, 1980): 202.
62. Ebeling, Ragamala Painting, 163.
63. Reproduced in Joachim Bautze, Indian Miniature
Paintings c. 1590–c. 1850 (Amsterdam: Galerie Saundarya
Lahari, 1987), cat. 44.
64. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, no. 1999.518;
Chazen Museum, University of Wisconsin–Madison, no.
2005.1.63.
65. Joseph Dye states that the series was produced in
Bikaner under Raja Karan Singh (r. 1631–1669), but does
not give his reasons. Joseph M. Dye III, The Arts of India
(Richmond: Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, in association
with Philip Wilson, London, 2001), 300–301. Nonstylistic
reasons for associating the series with Bikaner include its
marbled backing, a Deccani feature found in a few seven-
teenth-century Bikaner paintings, and its Persian and
Devanāgarı̄ inscriptions, which resemble inscriptions at
the top and bottom of other Bikaner paintings.
66. See Joachim Bautze, Lotosmond and Löwentritt: In-
dische Miniaturemalerei (Stuttgart: Linden-Museum, 1991),
cat. 26.
67. Schimmel, ‘‘A Dervish in the Guise of a Prince,’’ 211.
68. Compare, for example, the turbans in the proces-
sion scene in a page of the Bhāgavatapurāna at the Los
Angeles County Museum of Art, no. M.84.229.4, ˙ repro-
duced, on their website, http://collections.lacma.org/node/
249298 (accessed December 2012).
69. This page of the Bhāgavatapurāna is in the Metro-
politan Museum of Art, no. 2002.176. ˙ See the museum’s
website, http://www.metmuseum.org/collections/search-
 MOLLY EMMA AITKEN
70. Seyller noted this convention in Workshop and
Patron, 259. On the association of this page with Bikaner,
see B. N. Goswamy and Caron Smith, Domains of Wonder:
Selected Masterworks of Indian Painting (San Diego: San
Diego Museum of Art, 2005), pls. 16, 17.
71. Pramod Chandra, ‘‘Ustad Salivahana and the Devel-
opment of Popular Mughal Art,’’ Lalit Kala 8 (1960): 25–46.
72. Seyller, Workshop and Patron, 58.
73. Catherine Asher describes the cohesiveness of
Mughal-style subimperial architecture during this period,
particularly that produced by Amber’s Raja Man Singh.
See especially, ‘‘The Architecture of Raja Man Singh: A
Study of Sub-Imperial Patronage,’’ in Architecture of
Medieval India: Forms, Contexts, Histories, ed. Monica
Juneja (Delhi: Permanent Black, 2001), 370–97.
74. A couple of pages were recently published in
Glynn, Skelton, and Dallapiccola, Ragamala Paintings from
India, cats. 14 and 15.
75. Ibid., 24.
76. The possibility of such a sphere merits consider-
able further research. Illustrated series such as the Boston
Rasikpriya share many elements found in the paintings dis-
cussed here.
77. Jahangir mentions Dulip Singh arriving from the
Deccan in The Jahangirnama, 134.
78. Reproductions of these Asavaris can be found as
follows: Chawand Asavari Rāginı̄, Victoria and Albert,
no. IS38-1953, see their website http://collections.vam.ac.
uk; Chunar Asavari Rāginı̄, Freer and Sackler Galleries,
no. F1985.3, website www.asia.si.edu; Manley Rāgamālā
Asavari Rāginı̄, British Museum no. 1973,0917,0.8, web-
site www.britishmuseum.org).
79. For the most recent scholarship on the Chunar
Rāgamālā, see Beach, ‘‘The Master of the Chunar Raga-
mala,’’ Masters of Indian Painting, 1:291–304.
80. This a long-standing theme in the scholarly litera-
ture on Mewar painting. For my own summary, see Molly
Emma Aitken, The Intelligence of Tradition in Rajput
Court Painting (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press,
2010), 60–70.
81. Ebeling, Ragamala Painting, 118–28.
82. Beach, ‘‘The Masters of the Chunar Ragamala.’’
83. Bautze, ‘‘Early Painting at Bundi,’’ 13.
84. Ibid., 14.
85. Recently, an early seventeenth-century Bundi-style
portrait of Rao Bhoj Singh, previously in the Bikaner Palace
collection, was sold through Prahlad Bubbar’s London
gallery.
86. Finbar Barry Flood, Objects of Translation: Mate-
rial Culture and Medieval ‘‘Hindu-Muslim’’ Encounter
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009), 8.
87. Ibid., 9.
88. Seyller, Workshop and Patron, 264.
89. Goetz, ‘‘The Laud Album,’’ 63-74.
90. For more on the Mughal muraqqa‘, see Elaine
Wright, Muraqqa‘: Imperial Mughal Albums from the
 Sociability of Subimperial Painting 57
Chester Beatty Library (Alexandria, VA: Art Services In-
ternational, 2008). Though beautifully illustrated and
extensively informative, the catalogue did not take up the
challenge of exploring the intellectual dimensions of the
muraqqa‘ laid down by David Roxburgh’s The Persian
Album, 1400–1600: From Dispersal to Collection (New
Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005).
91. Roxburgh, The Persian Album.
92. Sheila Canby, ‘‘‘Abd Al-Samad,’’ in Masters of
Indian Painting, 1:98.
93. I am intrigued by Anastassia Botschkareva’s sug-
gestion to me, which she made after extensive study of
Mughal albums, that the emphasis on calligraphy, presence
of Arabic texts, less tightly scripted arrangement of pages,
and juxtaposition of paintings with calligraphy, answers
more to Safavid than Mughal prototypes (personal com-
munication, August 2012).
94. Allison Busch, Poetry of Kings: The Classical
Hindi Literature of Mughal India (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2011), 137. Entry for a Mughal portrait
of Zain Khan Koka, no. IS.91-1965, posted on the Victoria
and Albert Museum website (accessed June 11, 2013).
95. Morgan Library & Museum, no. M.386.5. Repro-
duced on their Website: www.themorgan.org/collections/
works/Islamic/manuscriptEnlarge.asp?page=66 (accessed
June 11, 2013).
96. Joan Cummins, ‘‘Awash in Meaning: Literary
Sources for Early Pahari Bathing Scenes,’’ in A Celebration
of Love: The Romantic Heroine in the Indian Arts, ed.
Harsha V. Dehejia (New Delhi: Roli Books, 2004), 156–57.
97. The page includes a yellow panel of text with a
verse from Bhanudatta’s Rasamañjari. In a private collec-
tion, the painting relates to a well-known early-seventeenth-
century Rasamañjari at the National Museum, New Delhi,
which is thought to have been produced in Mewar. The
artist and text are the same, but the frame has blue
cartouches that do not appear on the National Museum
folios. For more on this manuscript, see Andrew Topsfield,
Court Painting at Udaipur, Artibus Asiae Supplementum
XLIV (Zurich: Artibus Asiae, 2007), 57–58. The bather is
not the heroine of the illustrated verse, but one of her
friends. The heroine stands center, brushing at what she
thought was a lotus at the corner of her eye. For a trans-
lation of the verse, see Sheldon Pollock, ed. and trans.,
‘‘Bouquet of Rasa’’ and ‘‘River of Rasa’’ by Bhānudatta,
Clay Sanskrit Library 41 (New York: New York Uni-
versity Press and JJC Foundation, 2009), 8–9. Sheldon
Pollock has posted the painting, which belongs to the
National Museum of New Delhi, together with the rest of
the manuscript on the Clay Sanskrit Library website:
http://www.claysanskritlibrary.org/volume-v-38.html; select
‘‘view Udaipur Miniatures’’ (accessed October 2012).
98. A reproduction of the painting can be found at
http://www.claysanskritlibrary.org/volume-v-38.html; select
‘‘view Udaipur Miniatures’’ under ‘‘Bouquet of Rasa’’ and
‘‘River of Rasa’’ and look for the painting that illustrates
verse 42. (accessed October 2012).
58 ARCHIVES OF ASIAN ART
99. Pollock, ‘‘Bouquet of Rasa,’’ 40–41.
100. Ibid., 24–25.
101. The Jahangirnama, 452–53.
102. Busch, Poetry of Kings, 94.
103. Ibid., 140.
104. Ibid., 140–41.
105. Deborah Hutton, Art of the Court of Bijapur
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006), 83–96;
Debra Diamond, ‘‘Magical Imagination (wahm) and His-
torical Reception: The Yogini Paintings of Bijapur,’’ talk
presented at College Art Association, February 2011, New
York.
106. Cited in Katherine Brown, ‘‘Reading Indian Music:
The Interpretation of Seventeenth-Century European Travel-
Writing in the (Re)Construction of Indian Music History,’’
British Journal of Ethnomusicology 9, no. 2 (2000): 24. Of
course, the women may have been imitating a pictorial
conceit rather than the other way around.
107. Toby Falk and Mildred Archer, Indian Minia-
tures in the India Office Library (London: Sotheby Parke-
Bernet, 1981), cat. 12iv.
108. I base these conclusions on Alasdair Watson’s
initial findings. Curator of Middle Eastern and Islamic
Manuscripts at the Bodleian Library, he is currently en-
gaged in translating and interpreting these pages.
109. Nur-ud-din Abd-ur-Rahman Jami, Lawā’ih: A
Treatise on Sufism, trans. E. H. Whinfield and Mirza ˙Mu-
hammad Kazvini (London: Royal Asiatic Society, 1906), 36.
110. Rosalind O’Hanlon, ‘‘Manliness and Imperial
Service in Mughal North India,’’ Journal of the Economic
and Social History of the Orient 42, no. 1 (1999): 51.
111. Rajeev Kumar Kinra, ‘‘Secretary-Poets in Mughal
India and the Ethos of Persian: The Case of Chandar Bhan
Brahman,’’ PhD diss., University of Chicago, 2008, 196.
On Mughal sociability, see also O’Hanlon, ‘‘Manliness
and Imperial Service,’’ 47–93; and Mana Kia, ‘‘Contours
of Persianate Community’’ PhD diss., Harvard University,
2011.
112. O’Hanlon, ‘‘Manliness and Imperial Service,’’ 66.
113. For example, the Jami verses cited above from
Nur-ud-din ‘Abd-ur-Rahman Jami’s Lawā’ih.
114. Ebeling, Ragamala Painting, 120. ˙
115. Ibid., 124.
116. Abu al-Fazl, A‘in-i Akbari, Vol. III, 263–65.
117. Schofield, ‘‘Reviving the Golden Age,’’ 495.
118. Brown, ‘‘Hindustani Music,’’ 192, notes this
association in the Sangitaratnakara of Sarngadeva, circa
1250.
119. Ibid., 200.
120. Ibid., 223.
121. Rima Hooja, A History of Rajasthan (New Delhi:
Rupa & Co., 2006), 546.
122. Allison Busch, personal communication.
123. David Roxburgh, Prefacing the Image: The Writ-
ing of Art History in Sixteenth-Century Iran (Leiden: Brill,
2000), 3.
124. Kinra, ‘‘Secretary-Poets,’’ 256.
125. Ibid., 270.
126. Ibid., 190–91.
127. Hooja, A History of Rajasthan, 547.
128. Busch, Poetry of Kings, 163.
129. Schofield, ‘‘Reviving the Golden Age,’’ 494.