By William Dalrymple
The New York Review of Books
Around 1600, a dramatic shift took place in Mughal art. The Mughal
emperors of India were the most powerful monarchs of their day—at the
beginning of the seventeenth century, they ruled over a hundred million
subjects, five times the number administered by their only rivals, the
Ottomans. Much of the painting that took place in the ateliers of the
first Mughal emperors was effectively dynastic propaganda, and gloried
in the Mughals’ pomp and prestige. Illustrated copies were produced of
the diaries of Babur, the conqueror who first brought the Muslim dynasty
of the Mughal emperors to India in 1526, as well as exquisite paintings
illustrating every significant episode in the biography of his
grandson, Akbar.
Then, quite suddenly, at this moment of imperial climax, a young Hindu khanazad
(or “palace-born”) prodigy named Govardhan began painting images of a
sort that had never been seen before in Mughal art. They were not
pictures of battles or court receptions. Instead they were closely
observed portraits of holy men performing yogic asanas or
exercises that aimed to focus the mind and achieve spiritual liberation
and transcendence. The results of Govardhan’s experiments in
painting—along with a superbly curated selection of several hundred
other images from the history of yoga—were recently on view in “Yoga:
The Art of Transformation,” a remarkable exhibition at the Freer
and Sackler galleries in Washington, D.C., which will travel next to San
Francisco and Cleveland.
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