Review: The Great Mughals: Art, Architecture and Opulence at the V&A

A celebration of art and imperial glory at the apex of Mughal power

If the purpose of imperial art is to inspire deference and awe, there is abundant evidence of its effect at The Great Mughals, the ravishingly beautiful new show at London’s V&A. The exhibition, which is a prelude to a major redesign of the museum’s South Asia gallery, covers the golden age of the Mughal Empire, spanning the reigns of Akbar, who came to the throne at the age of 13, his son Jahangir, and his grandson Shah Jahan in the century or so from 1556. They are roughly contemporary with Elizabeth I, James I and Charles I, but if Elizabeth’s England was a nation just beginning to entertain dreams of empire, the Mughals were already a by-word for luxury, magnificence and power.

The first object you see is a pale green jade tankard, which once belonged to the grandson of Timur but which later came into the possession of Jahangir and Shah Jahan. In the exhibition it embodies the Mughals’ Timurid inheritance, and, in particular, that of Babur, Akbar’s grandfather and the founder of the Mughal dynasty, who had marched into Hindustan from Kabul and defeated the Delhi Sultanate at his fifth attempt in 1526. The tankard also expresses something about what the Mughals did with that inheritance. Its body is quite plain, save for some calligraphy in relief on its neck. The Mughals added an inscription in Persian around the rim praising Jahangir – ‘the donor in perpetuity of the symbols of reality and metaphor’, among other things – and a powerfully elegant and sinuous handle in the shape of a dragon, its golden tongue licking the vessel’s neck and forming the bond with the body. It is a different aesthetic entirely, one that consciously uses the seductive devices of art to articulate authority and command.

This dialogue between art and imperial power runs throughout the exhibition. Except dialogue is the wrong word. A pair of pages from the Akbar-Nama, a contemporary chronicle of Akbar’s reign, show dozens, perhaps hundreds, of men and women labouring under Akbar’s orders to build the Red Fort at Agra; both images are dense with activity and movement and crackle with the energy of command and obedience. Soon after, we see an image of Babur directing his men to alter the course of a stream in his garden in Kabul. It is a small act of imperial fiat, which seems to prefigure much of what follows in the exhibition: the cultural reshaping of peoples, nations and landscapes that empires entail; and the idea, dominant by the reign of Shah Jahan, of the cultivated paradisal garden as a metaphor for the peace of imperial rule.

We ourselves are culturally attuned to the idea of art as a critique of power; there is none of that here. Instead, we have room after room of often breathtaking artefacts that demonstrate extraordinary levels of technique and craft, and which, if anything, act as an uncomplicated celebration of the multicultural possibilities of empire. Through conquest, the Mughals brought together innumerable cultural traditions and practices. The manuscript images mentioned above, for instance, were the products of the Ketab-khana, the House of Books, in which predominantly Hindustani artists worked under Iranian masters; but it was just one of the new imperial workshops established by Akbar, himself illiterate, to articulate imperial greatness. A quite stunning golden ceremonial spoon set with rubies, emeralds, and diamonds marries Indian stone-setting techniques with an Iranian scrolling design to extraordinary effect.

Like any empire, that of the Mughal encompassed nations, regions and towns that specialised in specific crafts: Alwar was known for its gilded glass; Sirhind for its footwear, quivers and bows; and Sonepat for its swords and daggers. The exhibition focuses on the coastal province of Gujarat, which Akbar conquered in 1573, and which specialised in mother-of-pearl, either on its own as a material or as inlay, alongside ivory, in wood. One case here features four mother-of-pearl artefacts – a priming flask, a ewer, a salver, and a chalice – which are worth the entrance fee alone; how they must shimmer and glow in sunlight or in the presence of flickering candles. The Gujarati port of Surat was also where Akbar had his significant encounters with European travellers and merchants, and there are some dazzling objects inlaid with mother-of-pearl here, including an altar frontal made for the Portuguese in Goa and a shield, quite possibly a diplomatic gift given its splendour, which was in the Medici armoury in Florence by 1599.

The centrifugal force of Mughal wealth and power also attracted other peoples, materials, ideas and techniques to their court; examples of cultural traffic under the liberating protection of empire are everywhere. Huge Colombian emeralds, which came to the Mughal court via the Portuguese in Goa, are here, both in cases and on paper: one image shows Shah Jahan holding an emerald that is seemingly about the size of a doughnut. There is a gorgeous image of Tobias’ angel in watercolour and gold leaf; and a figure of St John the Evangelist copied from a Dürer print of the crucifixion by the 12-year-old Abu’l-Hasan, later one of the greatest artists at Jahangir’s court and already, evidently, prodigiously gifted. Adriaen Collaert’s late 16th-century Floreligium made its way to Jahangir’s court, too, and shaped the way Mughal artists represented flowers in their architectural designs and manuscripts illumination. We see Jahangir on a canopied golden throne designed by Augustin Hiriart, a Huguenot jeweller from Bordeaux, resident in Hindustan, who had spent three years making it. A large copper wine ewer, also from the reign of Jahangir, blends Safavid, Mughal, and Armenian styles. There were many Armenian merchants resident in Lahore, who often acted as Persian interpreters for foreign visitors. One case, featuring a punch dagger and a cup and salver, among other things, shows to what an exquisite degree Shah Jahan’s craftsmen mastered the imported European technique of enamelling.

Exotic animals are also part of the stock-in-trade of imperial glory, and they, too, are well represented here. The Turks, for example, brought a zebra to the court of Jahangir from Abyssinia, and there is a lovely, sad-eyed watercolour of it here drawn by Mansur, a court artist whom Jahangir dubbed Nadir al-’Asr, the wonder of the age. Mansur also gives a splendid turkey cock with a delightfully coy side-eye at the viewer, and – working alongside the equally talented Abu’l-Hasan – a simply glorious watercolour of 12 red squirrels, not native to India, in a glowing autumnal plane tree. There is a man at the base of the tree readying himself to climb, but you doubt he will catch them: the squirrels seem to speak to all the explosive, resistant exuberance of life that evades even the most dominant of imperial cultures. There are any number of things to admire here, but I can’t imagine anyone looking at this and not falling in love with it.

Only in a couple of places in the exhibition is there really a note of the kind of violence that underpins imperial expansion. One image, in particular, is startling: the head of Malik Ambar, whose armies consistently frustrated Mughal attempts to conquer the Deccan sultanate of Ahmadnagar, is on a spike, and Jahangir is shooting arrows into his face from a couple of feet away. It is a strange image, a kind of psychotic fantasy at odds with the affirmatory idylls of Mughal authority celebrated elsewhere. But it is very much a fantasy: Ambar would live for some years yet, as a later portrait in the exhibition, probably made from life, reveals.

The image is a fantasy in another way: it shows Jahangir standing on a globe of the world as he aims at his enemy’s head, an ideal of dominance that Jahangir’s frustrated rage with Ambar would seem to undermine. Around the same time, Jahangir, whose own name means ‘World Seizer’, gave his son Khurram the title Shah Jahan, which the latter then retained when he took the throne after his father’s death. It means ‘King of the World’, and there is an image of Shah Jahan in just that role from a decade later: he, too, is standing on a globe, his head framed by a corona of light, while angels hover overhead with a crown. At his feet a lion and a lamb lie at peace together. It is this image that features in the V&A’s marketing for the exhibition, and with good reason: it is strikingly imperious, radiating power and self-belief. Perhaps it is just chance that across the room from this painting is another of Shah Jahan’s second son, Aurangzeb, who would overthrow his father and imprison him in Akbar’s Red Fort in Agra, that great symbol of Mughal dominion, which we saw being constructed at the beginning of the exhibition, a tidy but bitter coda to the century of power, excellence, and extravagance this exhibition so eloquently displays.

Stepping into the last room here we are told that the walls of Shah Jahan’s Delhi palace were inscribed with lines from Amir Khusrow, a Persian poet from the age of the Delhi Sultanate: ‘If there is Paradise on earth, it is this, it is this, it is this.’ The words were co-opted, certainly; immature empires imitate, one might say, mature empires steal. But looking back through the treasure-packed rooms of The Great Mughals, you’re left with the sad, sneaking doubt that perhaps those words were true and that the three generations of Mughal imperialism covered here really did represent a moment of unparalleled opulence and artifice. And then you think how seductively the metaphors of art are still working their magic in the service of power: you can’t help but gratefully submit to all this magnificence and wonder.

This review first appeared on Engelsberg Ideas.