A HERO TOPPLES A DEMON, DECCAN OR RAJASTHAN, LATE 17TH CENTURY

Ink and opaque watercolour on paper, inscribed at lower left "Rustam and Demon"

Welch 1997, fig.14, p.25

Generally in fair condition. Pigments in good condition. Uncoloured paper of background with some creases and small associated paper losses around edges, especially along right edge and at lower left corner. One crease at upper centre extending 6cm but not affecting painted area. As viewed.
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This is a highly unusual and important Indian miniature, replicating (in reverse) a 14th century composition from the well-known but enigmatic "Siyah-Qalam" drawings in the Topkapi Saray Library's album H.2153 (f.64r). It is a remarkable instance of the transfer of a specific composition from one region to another and from one period to another.

Amongst the treasures in the Topkapi Saray Library in Istanbul are two albums (H.2153 and H.2160), known as the Yaqub Beg Albums, or Fatih Albums, that contain a large and diverse group of intriguing and dynamic drawings of strange and unusual subject matter, executed in peculiar and distinctive styles that in most cases do not conform to the general manner associated with 14th and 15th Persian or Turkman painting. Within these albums are a sub-group of distinctive type, many inscribed with the name Muhammad Siyah Qalam ('Muhammad of the Black Pen'). So powerful and enigmatic are they, that the drawings and the albums in general have been debated enthusiastically by scholars for decades (see Islamic Art 1981; Ipsiroglu 1976; Roxburgh 2005, ch.4, pp.146-189). The specific composition from which the present work is taken appears on folio 64r of album H.2153 (see Islamic Art 1981, fig.275; Ipsiroglu 1976, pl.32).

The re-use of compositional elements was a frequent occurrence in Persian and Indian painting, and the apprenticeship system within ateliers, and the reverence for the work of earlier masters, meant that it was a particularly strong feature of Perso-Indian art from the 14th century onwards. It was common to find a specific vignette from a miniature re-used by an artist of the same or a subsequent generation within the same school of painting, or even further afield, and the movement of artists themselves from school to school, court to court and country to country enhanced this phenomenon (many 16th century Persian artists, for example, moved to court ateliers in Turkey and India). However, the re-use of a whole drawing composition from 14th or 15th century north-west Iran in a work of late 17th century Central Indian origin is certainly an extreme example.

We know that the original drawing in the Siyah Qalam albums cannot have been in India to act as the source, since the Yaqub Beg albums arrived in Istanbul by 1520 at the latest (one of them bears seal impressions of Sultan Selim I, whose reign ended in 1520). The explanation may stem from the strong cultural links that existed between the Muslim sultanates of the Deccan and the courts of the Iranian region from the 15th century onwards. There were frequent exchanges of artists and poets, calligraphers and illuminators, mostly from the Persian world to the Deccani states rather than vice-versa, and it is possible that the composition of the present work arrived in India with an emigré artist in the form of a pounce or tracing (the use of pounces at this period is well-known, but proof can be found in, for instance, a pounce of an early Timurid drawing of a warrior, see Lentz and Lowry 1989, fig.61, p.174). Furthermore, the founders of the Qutb-Shahi dynasty of Golconda were themselves Turkman emigré princes, who moved to the Deccan in the late 15th century.

If this is the most likely route by which the design for this picture arrived in India, a puzzling aspect is the absence of any other known versions of this composition in earlier Deccani or Mughal art. It is unusual for a distinctive composition such as this to crop up entire and whole some three hundred years later in a different region, with no intermediate examples. It is like an artistic recessive gene. However, an interesting parallel exists in an Indian miniature in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, attributed to Rajasthan or the Deccan in the last quarter of the 17th century - the same period and geographic origin as the present work. It depicts a pair of large demons walking through a wooded and hilly landscape with a town in the distance (see Kossak 1997, no.34, pp.66-67). The form of the demons is distinctive and can also be traced back directly to prototypes in the two Topkapi albums (for illustrations of prototypes see Ipsiroglu 1976; Islamic Art 1981, figs.208-213, 244-249, 267-308; Roxburgh 2005, nos.125-140, pp.174-185; Rogers, Çagman and Tanindi 1986, nos.81-90).

A further intriguing aspect to the iconography of the present work appears in the sculptures at Vijayanagar. Anna Dallapiccola discussed the presence of sculptures, particularly on the Great Platform, of Central Asian figures associated with the Turkic ghulams and mercenaries employed at the Bahmanid court in the 15th century (see Dallapiccola 2001; Dallapiccola 2010b, pp.88-90). Among these are several showing wrestlers, of which one shows a pair of human wrestlers in a composition very close to that of the present work and its parent drawing in the Istanbul albums. Thus it is possible that a specific Central Asian mode of wrestling, perhaps a particular 'throw', provided the source for both the Vijayanagar sculpture and the Siyah Qalam drawing.

In terms of its Indian context, Cary Welch attributed this work to an artist dubbed by him "the Kotah Master". He explained his ideas concerning the movement of skilled artists from the declining Deccani courts in the second half of the 17th century to more culturally energetic Rajput courts (mostly in Rajasthan, although he also surmised that some ended up in the Punjab Hills), and suggested that this work was executed by one such artist while still in the Deccan before moving to Kotah with Jagat Singh (Welch 1997, pp.17-30). He discussed the present work as follows:
"The Kotah Master's Iranian - specifically Turkman and Safavid - stylistic roots are even more clearly demonstrated in a partially colored drawing attributable to him. In it, a graceful, Rustam-like hero topples a snarlingly petulant demon (div). Line for line, this was borrowed from a powerful Turkman picture in the so-called Yaqub- Bek Album preserved in the Topkapi Sarayi Musuem Library of Istanbul. It is quite likely that the Kotah Master's picture was based on a version of the Turkman picture brought to Golconda by its founder, Sultan Quli-Qutbul Mulk, the erstwhile Aq-Qyunlu prince admired for his knowledge and patronage of poetry and art. Whether executed at Golconda, Aurangabad or Kotah, this spirited picture owes its existence to a tracing or pounce, which the artist chose to reverse." (Welch 1997, pp.25-26).