front cover of The Emperor Who Never Was
The Emperor Who Never Was
Dara Shukoh in Mughal India
Supriya Gandhi
Harvard University Press, 2019

The definitive biography of the eldest son of Emperor Shah Jahan, whose death at the hands of his younger brother Aurangzeb changed the course of South Asian history.

Dara Shukoh was the eldest son of Shah Jahan, the fifth Mughal emperor, best known for commissioning the Taj Mahal as a mausoleum for his beloved wife Mumtaz Mahal. Although the Mughals did not practice primogeniture, Dara, a Sufi who studied Hindu thought, was the presumed heir to the throne and prepared himself to be India’s next ruler. In this exquisite narrative biography, the most comprehensive ever written, Supriya Gandhi draws on archival sources to tell the story of the four brothers—Dara, Shuja, Murad, and Aurangzeb—who with their older sister Jahanara Begum clashed during a war of succession. Emerging victorious, Aurangzeb executed his brothers, jailed his father, and became the sixth and last great Mughal. After Aurangzeb’s reign, the Mughal Empire began to disintegrate. Endless battles with rival rulers depleted the royal coffers, until by the end of the seventeenth century Europeans would start gaining a foothold along the edges of the subcontinent.

Historians have long wondered whether the Mughal Empire would have crumbled when it did, allowing European traders to seize control of India, if Dara Shukoh had ascended the throne. To many in South Asia, Aurangzeb is the scholastic bigot who imposed a strict form of Islam and alienated his non-Muslim subjects. Dara, by contrast, is mythologized as a poet and mystic. Gandhi’s nuanced biography gives us a more complex and revealing portrait of this Mughal prince than we have ever had.

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Imaging Sound
An Ethnomusicological Study of Music, Art, and Culture in Mughal India
Bonnie C. Wade
University of Chicago Press, 1998
The rulers of the Mughal Empire of India, who reigned from 1526 to 1858, spared no expense as patrons of the arts. They left as their legacy an extraordinarily rich body of commissioned artistic projects, including illustrated manuscripts and paintings that represent music-making in numerous spheres of Mughal court life, particularly that of women. These images form the basis of Bonnie C. Wade's study of how musicians of Hindustan encountered and Indianized music from the Persian cultural sphere.

Combining ethnomusicological and art historical methods with history and lore, Wade focuses first on paintings for Akbar, showing how political and cultural agendas intertwined in the portrayal of his life and that of his grandfather Babur and father, Humayun. Wade then follows the depictions of music-making through paintings for Akbar's successors, Jahangir and Shah Jahan, to trace the gradual synthesis of Persian and Indian culture. Richly illustrated with reproductions of rare Mughal paintings, this work will appeal broadly to anyone interested in Indian history, ethnomusicology, and art history.
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Paintings from Mughal India
Andrew Topsfield
Bodleian Library Publishing, 2008

One of the great kingdoms of human history, the Mughal empire is now lost to the relentless sweep of time. But the wealth of art treasures the Mughals left behind is nonetheless a lasting testament to the sumptuousness of their culture. Among the most notable vestiges of their art are the lush miniature paintings of Mughal imperial life, and Andrew Topsfield explores a rich array of these painted works in Paintings from Mughal India.

            Between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, the Mughal emperors presided over a flourishing cultural renaissance, and these miniature paintings vividly depict the splendor of this period. Topsfield examines the paintings’ unique blend of Indian, Islamic, and Persian styles and analyzes their varied subjects—ranging from hunting, royal banquets, and other scenes of imperial life to legendary tales, mythic deities, and battles. Among the paintings featured in the book’s vibrant reproductions are works created between the reign of Akbar and the fall of Shah Jehanan—an era considered to be the height of Mughal painting—and illustrations from the celebrated Baharistan manuscript of 1595. A fascinating and gorgeously illustrated study, Paintings from Mughal India will be an invaluable resource for all art scholars and anyone interested in the legacy of the Mughal Empire.

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front cover of Paintings from Mughal India
Paintings from Mughal India
Andrew Topsfield
Bodleian Library Publishing, 2008
One of the great kingdoms of human history, the Mughal Empire is now lost to the relentless sweep of time. But the wealth of treasures left behind offers a lasting testament to the sumptuousness of its culture. Among the most notable of these treasures are the lush miniature paintings showing the splendor of Mughal imperial life.

Andrew Topsfield examines these paintings that bear the influence of Indian, Islamic, and Persian styles and portray a variety of subjects, from hunting, royal banquets, and other scenes of imperial life to legends, battles, and mythic deities. Among the paintings featured in the book’s vibrant reproductions are illustrations from the celebrated Baharistan manuscript of 1595 and works created between the reign of Akbar and the fall of Shah Jahan in 1658—an era considered to be the height of Mughal art. For this new edition, Topsfield has made corrections and revisions reflecting new research.
A fascinating and gorgeously illustrated study, Paintings from Mughal India will be an invaluable resource for all art scholars and anyone interested in the legacy of the Mughal Empire.

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